Cornish Pirates 23 Nottingham 31

Sunday September 28th 2008

By YOG (Mark Curtis)

When the merry robbing men of Nottingham play the scurvy Pirates of Cornwall it always seems to comes down to which fugitives from the law can make off with the ill gotten gains.

However today the more consistent team walked off with the loot, although some might argue they were aided and abetted in their task by a third party.

Directly after the match today I was tempted to go home and submit the report I wrote for the Exeter match and just change the names. But in all honesty it wouldn't have been fair to the Pirates team that played today. Certainly a lot of the same mistakes were made, and a lot of the same criticisms were still valid, but whereas the during the Exeter match the Pirates only played as a cohesive and passionate force for forty minutes, today they managed to extend that to at least sixty minutes. Certainly not good …. but better.

Today was the latest in an increasing list of frustrating games for the Pirates faithful to have to watch. The frustration isn't because the current team are uniformly bad or constantly play bellow their ability, the frustration is borne out of the fact that they constantly show they can play top drawer rugby and can potentially beat any team put in front of them …. shortly before doing something incredibly unthinking, or turning off completely.

ime and again today we saw the Pirates play some beautiful rugby, recycling several phases of play, some obviously well practiced running patterns, periods of good defence and some great individual moments. However we also saw some aimless kicking, some indecision and something that has never appeared in any Pirates team before it made an unwelcome first appearance in the away match at Rotherham last season .. the dreaded "OFF" switch, which has the ability to switch the whole team off, and which usually makes an appearance with ten to fifteen minutes left to play in the match.

Considering that Nottingham are famed for their powerful pact, the Pirates pack acquitted themselves about as well as expected, generally competing in the scrum and with only some late match desperation spoiling it's effectiveness near the end, the lineout worked well, as it has all season so far. The main criticism of the forwards today would be their fighting spirit at the breakdown. It seems to be becoming the norm for the forwards to commit as few people to the breakdown as possible. I suspect the reason is that if you can commit less players to the breakdown than the other team, when the ball comes back you then have a tactical advantage in numbers.

There are two problems with this though, firstly with so few committed players the ball may not come back, and secondly it seems to induce a "wait and see" attitude in the players on the fringe of the breakdown, with them appearing to be slow to adapt to changes in circumstance to what happens in the breakdown.

The backs definitely had the best of it today, with some brilliant play taking the game from one side of the pitch to the complete opposite side and back again, on several occasions making Nottingham look overstretched and vulnerable, which on three occasions resulted in tries for the Pirates. Whilst Marika Vakacegu deservedly took the man of the match plaudits, I would say it was the backs as a whole that looked the most like a cohesive attacking force.

Continued >>>>>

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