Both Raiders and Old Albanians made it four bonus-point wins out of four at the weekend to set up a battle royale between two teams looking to retain their unbeaten tag and Guernsey director of rugby Jordan Reynolds admitted yesterday that the excitement is already building within his club’s ranks.
‘These are the games we play rugby for,’ he said.
‘OAs were pretty much top of the league for three-quarters of last season before just tailing off, they have pretty much got the same squad with a couple of edits, and it is awesome to have them coming here with both sides unbeaten.
‘It’s just exciting and I’m really looking forward to it, as the rest of the community should be because if you want to see a cracking game of rugby between two top sides, here’s your chance.’
Raiders will head into the big encounter with their confidence boosted by producing ‘almost a perfect half’ against Colchester on Saturday according to their head coach.
The eventual 41-33 scoreline might make the game look closer than it was in reality, with Guernsey having blown away their hosts in the first period as they scored five tries to establish a commanding 33-7 lead by the interval.
‘We had one missed tackle, which led to a try, but besides that it really showed where this squad has got to over the last month,’ Reynolds said.
‘Colchester have had some big wins – they put 40 points on Westcombe Park and won away at London Welsh – so if you reflect on that first half there is so much to be happy about. From when they kicked off and we caught it, the feeling on the sideline was we were just in control.
‘The way we performed in that first half, I would not say it shocked everyone, but when we came in at half-time it was like, “there it is”, with energy and execution.
‘When you are already five tries up at half-time, it is very difficult to go out and put the some amount of intensity into the game, so the second half did not go exactly as we would have liked, but we got some great learnings out of it because we came under pressure and momentum is always going to shift at certain points in a game and we have to learn about regaining it, which we did do.’
Raiders got off to a flier with Anthony Armstrong, Callum Roberts and Joe Wrafter all scoring tries inside the first quarter of the game and Charlie Simmonds went over for the bonus-point try after 25 minutes.
Colchester got on the board with Jonah Varela’s converted try, but Guernsey had the final word of the half when Ciaran McGann touched down and Gwyn Parks knocked over his third conversion to restore the 26-point lead.
The home side started eating into the deficit when they scored tries through Ben Mills and Finley McCartney while Raiders were temporarily down to 14 with Joel Broadhurst in the sin-bin, but Raiders responded with a Parks penalty and a Michael Cantle try once back up to a full complement.
Colchester touched down twice in the last three minutes through Harvey Ellis and Joseph Collier with the result already beyond doubt.
‘It could have easily been 40 points by half-time because we had a breakaway but the last pass went a little astray,’ Reynolds said.
‘They scored two tries at the end of the game to get within eight, but there was a pretty big gap there.
‘We were less concerned about what happened in the second half because I would rather have those learning when winning and it is a really good place to be getting five points on the road having performed really well in the first half and getting something out of the second half in terms of experience – it worked out well for us.’
The outstanding first-half performance was even more impressive considering the late changes enforced on Raiders by the loss of John Dawe to injury and Josh Poullet to illness.
‘We had to make a change and Iwan Shenton then had to call the line-outs at late notice, but he had a really strong game, and our scrum was dominant,’ said Reynolds.
‘I think the mindset of the playing group is that they are there to challenge these big games and every game we have played has got slightly harder, but we have been improving each week.
‘But going into the OAs game, I think the key is how big a crowd we can get because we are probably going to need that little bit extra help and getting a good atmosphere is going to lift us.
‘We can take a lot of confidence from our first half at Colchester, but OAs are super-dangerous and that level of performance is going to have to be there for the entire 80 minutes.’
TEAMS
Colchester: O’Neil, McCartney, Jeffery, name withheld, De Lucchi, Wagstaff, Webb, Reid, Daly, Mills, Varela, Bureau, Gilmour, Parry, Clark. Replacements: Harrison, Whiteman, Ellis, Blakemore, Collier.
Guernsey Raiders: Wrafter, Callery, Dromantas, Webb, Broadhurst, Creber, Rice, Shenton, Simmonds, Parks, Smith, M Armstrong, C McGann, A Armstrong, Roberts. Replacements: Cantle, Currie, Wakeham, Rutledge, Kent.
