Clifton v Keynsham

The boys blew away the post-Christmas cobwebs with a seven tries to one victory over a strong Keynsham outfit in this friendly fixture.

The win was a good confidence booster ahead of our Bristol Combination Cup semi-final against Chippenham on Sunday, especially as Keynsham had impressively defeated Bath in the Somerset Cup the previous weekend.

Both teams took the opportunity to rotate their squad players which meant some structure and fluidity was lost at times. But overall this was a full-blooded encounter with some good passages of play.

We started brightly with a lengthy series of phases, but it took a while to break down the Keynsham defence for our first try. We then went on to score a further six tries during the match (all superbly converted by Archie), but we were never totally dominant as the scoreline might suggest.

This was mainly due to the constant stream of penalties we gave away, and an unusually high number of errors that cost us possession. So we’ve plenty to focus on ahead of Chippenham.

Now, in a new feature of our match reports we give the platform over to our try scorers – partly because no one had pen and paper to jot down who they were. We’ve only had three submissions at the time of going to press.

Sam Read: “George took the ball and beat a couple of players who then did a long pass to me on the wing. I ran from about the halfway line to the 22 and then cut inside when the fullback tried to tackle me before scoring under the posts.”

Ben: “As I ran over to the ruck I saw an opportunity to get the lads another try when I saw two Keynsham defenders the size of my little sister on the line. I headed straight towards them for an easy try.”

Sam Sproull "The ball came to me in the centre and I had a fairly simple run to the line. At the time I thought I'd run about 20m, but when I discussed it at school I realised it was the length of the pitch."