A fired-up Leeds side, looking for their first points of the season, dominated the opening few minutes of the match and scored the first try through Joe Bedford, though missing the conversion. However the Falcons quickly imposed themselves and though Matthew Burke missed a penalty a quite brilliant try from May, taking the ball on the right and running across the pitch and through the defence to score on the left got us level, the resulting conversion again missed.

In a scrappy game that always looked like it would come down to kicks, Steve Jones scored his first points in a black shirt with a drop-goal, but slack passing including one move in our own 22 which featured two or three high balls in a row were keeping Falcons fans right on the edge.

Andy Long, that most unlikely of scorers, was driven over following a lineout and a series of scrums when Leeds went dangerously close to conceding a penalty try, and with his third attempt at a kick from the far right Burke bombed the kick over. Despite a dodgy performance, everything looked good at half-time despite Leigh Hinton's late penalty.

The second half though saw Leeds bombard us through most of the play, and as Joe McDonnell was taken off and Phil Dowson injured (again) Leeds hit two penalties either side of a Burke drop-goal. God was blocked from making a tackle as the team-formerly-known-as-Tykes threatened in our 22, before making a tremendous try-saving tackle on the left and crashed into the ground, eventually being helped from the field to be replaced with Ollie Phillips. As he walked off behind the goal hopefully the huge ovation from the South Stand made him feel slightly less ill.

Things became very tense when Erik Lund scored with ten minutes left and took the lead for the first time since the first quarter of an hour, and with our highest crowd of the season (a measly 6,847!) throwing their backing behind the lads, makeshift full-back May sent over a booming drop-goal to sneak us back ahead 21-19. Leeds could not muster any more points, and the Falcons wound the last two minutes down in the right hand corner to ensure a third home win of the season.

Tom May was deservedly man of the match, and looks like a different player this season, but it was very hairy without the key players Burke, Dowson and McDonnell, and I don't know if David Wilson was injured but can we PLEASE not go back to subbing a prop and then bringing him back on for the sake of it!

On the other hand though, second in the league, and our highest position since September 2004 if I'm not wrong, isn't too bad, however it is achieved.