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Cornish Pirates 48 Newbury Blues 5
By Dick Struaghan September 2 2008
Pirates 48 Newbury Blues 5. On paper at least there is nothing to complain about after this opening day romp in the Camborne sunshine for the Pirates. Seven tries and little serious defensive work to contend with sent the decent sized crowd home happy.

Cornish Pirates 48 Newbury Blues 5
 31st August 2008

By Dick Struaghan

On paper at least there is nothing to complain about after this opening day romp in the Camborne sunshine for the Pirates. Seven tries and little serious defensive work to contend with sent the decent sized crowd home happy but the smiles in the Pirates camp belied some real irritation with a high error count and several spurned scoring opportunities.

You cannot expect perfection on the first day of the season and maybe with a bit more match fitness Rhodri McAtee would have sealed his epic 70 metre dash late in the game with a try. But Vakacegu, Winnan and Elloway - why do front row forwards crop up on the wing when you least want to see them there? - all missed gilt edged opportunities in the first half, whilst Griffiths, McAtee and Winnan again chose wrong options in the latter stages.

Perhaps I`m being harsh but it is refreshing to hear the Pirates squad being equally harsh on themselves. No laurels for the resting on have been purchased this season.

As team Captain Adryan Winnan explained afterwards, "It`s a win but we struggled a bit to get into the game. We had a problem with the new ELV`s around the contact area against Redruth and we thought we had addressed that last week but we had a problem again today. If you are not on the front foot you tend to lose the first contact, struggle to get momentum and we had to play rugby in a flat line with everyone creeping. In rugby it's quite difficult to realign yourselves. Its good that we won the game but we only played at about 60%."

The Pirates were actually on the scoreboard quickly with debutant fly-half Doug Sanft atoning for a 3rd minute penalty miss with a 40 metre effort minutes later. A superb break by Winnan along the left hand touchline minutes later brought the first try as his deft chip inside was fielded by Fijian flyer Marika Vakacegu for a simple score.

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