Three tries for Guernsey in unconvincing victory

Guernsey 17, Millbrook 0

A HARD-FOUGHT victory was soured for Rob Box by the loss of fly-half Divan van den Heever at Foote's Lane on Saturday. The South African took a knock on the head when making a tackle in the 10th minute of Guernsey's clash with Millbrook but after receiving treatment, he was able to continue.

However, 10 minutes and a few more tackles later, van den Heever was on the deck once more suffering from dizziness and this time he did not get up. He was taken to hospital by ambulance with suspected delayed concussion, causing a 15-minute delay in the match.

The Sarnians did manage to score all their points after the enforced reshuffle but it was not a particularly convincing display.

The coach was far from content after the game.

'The performance I was not overly impressed with. The guys made everything seem so hard. Whether they just had the Christmas blues I don't know. Maybe we just had the wrong people doing the wrong things,' said Box.

'I am happy with the result, not with the performance and I am not happy that we lost another number 10. It looks like it might just be delayed concussion but even that carries a mandatory three-week break for the player.'

The injury to van den Heever highlighted the stop-start nature of the encounter.

Within the opening couple of minutes, there had been several handling errors and a couple of stoppages for injuries.

The first scoring opportunity came on 7min. when a huge hit on a Millbrook attacker, with van den Heever being one of the tacklers, freed the ball and Carl Johnson broke away only for his 40-yard run to end with a forward pass to Paul Livesey.

The remainder of the half was scrappy, with Guernsey showing some decent defence, especially after the reshuffle that saw Andy Bailey switch to fly-half, Livesey move into the centre and substitute Darren Jones fill the left-wing position. There was also a change of prop at the same time with Steve Thomas - another injury victim - replaced by Simon Ogier.

But a touch of Livesey magic five minutes before half-time gave the green-and-whites a 7-0 lead at the interval.

Dave Willis, who got through an immense amount of work along with his back-row colleagues, James Regnard and Ben Mahy, knocked the ball loose in a superb tackle on halfway and in a flash the St Sampson's teacher had gathered brilliantly and sprinted past the remaining Millbrook players to score. Velde van der Merve added the conversion.

The game continued in much the same vein in the second half - the two packs in constant battle with neither ever looking superior while Guernsey's three quarters showed only very rare glimpses of their capabilities. For the visitors, back-rowers Dean Weaver and Mike Mulcaisy were outstanding.

With a quarter of the match remaining, Millbrook fly-half Adam Cripps was given the chance to cut the deficit but his penalty attempt from on the Guernsey 22 was wayward and the visitors never came very close to scoring again even though they had the better of the territory.

The home side finally came up with a match-sealing try on 69min.

They managed to retain possession after another clumsy line-out and skipper Johnson took Bailey's pass at pace to break through the first two tackles on the Millbrook 22.

He then used Jim Elliott as a dummy runner on the outside and forced his way over the line for a fine individual score.

Guernsey added their third score with the last move of the game in injury time.

It was a superb move with Bailey's jinking run the start of it. Once they had run out of room on the right after a couple more phases, they moved it left where Ogier popped up to take the final pass, beat his man and finish more like a winger than a prop - his first try for the team.

But such an excellent ending was just a fine gloss on what had been a generally disappointing day for Box.

'We made things too difficult for ourselves,' he said.

'The line-out was not good at all. It was not just the throwing-in but the actual catching was poor. All right, conditions did not help but you have to be able to cope with them.

'And we rucked as well as we can for only about five minutes of the game.

'But Millbrook are always a tough side to play against and I thought we dealt with them well.

'The defence was probably the best quality of our game.'