Wed 22 Mar 2023
Wallingford travelled up to league leaders Chinnor III for their final game of league season on a blustery evening in east Oxfordshire.
In selection, Wallingford were without Carl Tappin, Tom Bradfield and Tom Diment in the pack, but were able to welcome back Jack Thurston, Max Suttner and Jamie Wood, whilst in the backs, a brand new centre partnership of Harry Marffy and Sam Botting came in for the absent Murray Bellis and James Springer.
After Chinnor kicked off, a missed knock on in the tackle allowed the hosts to turn the ball over in the opening minute as Chinnor applied some early pressure. This pressure eventually resulted in a penalty in the Wallingford twenty-two which the Chinnor full-back tapped quickly and finished well under pressure. Conversion made.
Unphased by this setback, Wallingford went about working their way back into the game as they probed the Chinnor defence with a mixture of forwards and backs carries, though the organised Chinnor defence gave very little away.
A break down the left by JJ Brown then took play to the edge of the Chinnor twenty-two, before the visitors won the first of a string of penalties at the breakdown. But kicking to the corner wasn’t to prove as fruitful as usual as the strong wind made executing the catch and drive somewhat problematic.
After a sustained spell of pressure in the Chinnor half, the visitors eventually settled for a converted Ollie Corbett penalty to narrow the deficit.
A well-drilled Chinnor outfit soon came back into the game and looked to stretch the Wallingford defence with some crisp backs play, but the visitors just about managed to keep them at bay. The hosts did create one more gilt-edged chance in the half, as their hooker bundled his way over the line but was well held up.
Strangely, an attacking scrum instead of a goal line drop out was awarded, but Wallingford promptly drove their opponents off the ball, allowing Jacob Knight to clear their lines. The scrum was to prove an area of almost complete dominance for Wallingford, albeit only one scrum penalty in the entire match was scant reward for their efforts.
With two strong defences on top, the rest of the half was punctuated by penalties and injuries, as Chinnor lost their scrum half after half an hour. Wallingford did manage to cross the whitewash, with Felix Cotton dancing over from twenty meters, but he was adjudged to have been held up.
Despite dominating the latter stages of the half, excellent Chinnor defence saw Wallingford unable to convert their possession in to points, as the half ended 7-3 to Chinnor.
The attritional contest was beginning to take its toll on both sides, as Wallingford lost key backs Jacob Knight and Sam Botting to injury, resulting in Nathan Chapman moving into a makeshift backline with Marffy moving to fly-half.
Against a strong head wind, and without their regular fly-half, exits were not easy to come by in the second half, as Wallingford had to run the ball from deep a lot more than usual.
With the pack still dominating the scrum and starting to edge their counterparts in the loose, Wallingford enjoyed plenty of possession but were struggling to materially break down the organised and aggressive Chinnor defence.
But a moment of brilliance from the increasingly influential Wood saw the number 8 go straight through the middle of a ruck before offloading in the tackle to the supporting James Norris who sprinted in from 15m, a relative coast-to-coast by his standards.
The hosts, spurred on by a vocal horde of Chinnor-supporting referees assessors, came back and levelled the scores from a well struck penalty 45m out after Marffy gave away a penalty for probably being more offside than any player in the history of rugby.
It was then Wallingford’s turn to come back into the game, and they had a string of rampant scrums around the twenty-two which somehow didn’t earn any penalties, before a slap down finally resulted in a kickable penalty which Corbett converted.
A three point game with ten minutes left, it was all to play for. Chinnor came back strongly and won a string of penalties, but with the set-piece struggling, the eventually decided to go for the posts, as a simple penalty levelled the scores.
As the game neared a climax, the visitors created one final chance. Kicking a penalty to the corner, the 5m line-out was adjudged not straight, and then to add insult to injury, the resulting scrum saw them penalised for an early push. Chinnor cleared their lines and that was the last meaningful act of the game, as the game ended 13 apiece.
This was a brutal encounter, with the two best defences in the league showing a level of physicality and intensity rarely seen in level 7 rugby.
Wallingford were gutted that they couldn’t finish the job and end Chinnor’s long unbeaten run, but credit to Chinnor, who dealt with a number of injuries and going down to 14 players for the last quarter to keep the visitors at bay.
Congratulations to Chinnor for clinching the league title, they have been the standout team in the league all season and are deserved champions.
Wallingford ended the season in third place, undefeated since November – their best run since 2008! The strides forward this young team has made this season under Marcus Wiltshire is truly incredible.
Whilst other clubs have struggled since Covid, Wallingford are very fortunate that things have fallen into place over the last year or so – coached by an excellent and popular coach in Marcus, led by example by skipper James Norris, this group of players has combined brilliantly not just on the pitch but off the pitch.
And the impact of last season’s SDS, namely JJ Brown, Jacob Knight, Felix Harris, Rob Moroney, Billy McDermott, Tyler Harvey, Felix Cotton and Isaac Hall, has been pivotal to the season’s successes, and everyone is excited to see where this group of players can go in the coming years.
