One look at the scoreline and you’d have good reason to think Tuesday’s probable league decider was a bit of a thriller. Four tries apiece has the potential to have been a corker of a game, especially when you consider how much was at stake. It wasn’t the case though. The match was a stormer but was hardly a feast of exciting rugby.
The two colleges enjoyed very different lead-ins to the match. Oriel had managed to play all three of their scheduled games, losing narrowly to Teddy Hall with a reduced side and blowing Catz and Christ Church out of the water. On the other hand Keble, after a first week win over the Hall, had been forfeited against twice, so were likely to be match-rusty.
This fear of being out of the pace of contested rugby was immediately put to bed by a stonking start from the men in red. From the kick-off it was all Keble for the first fifteen minutes or so: hard, committed rucking providing good ball for an incisive backline, with any Oriel possession being fairly swiftly snuffed out by well-organised defence. It was made to count on the scoreboard too as Keble racked up three tries without much fuss, fly-half Charlie King providing the conversions.
All thoughts of a potential shellacking were extinguished by a yellow card at around the twentieth minute though. The atmosphere had been testy all game, with a lot of words exchanged between players of both sides and the referee, and clearly the official had had his fill of offences on the floor, Keble’s hooker sin-binned without much fanfare. From that point on the character of the match obviously changed, with Oriel on the front foot. Strong, manful running from the two second rows and the captain Ben Symington in particular put severe pressure on the Keble defence. They stepped up to it though, weathering the ten minute storm. Indeed it was only after the fifteenth man had returned that Keble conceded, on the cusp of half-time after a sustained period of Oriel forward attacks through pick-and-gos.
As the second half began, in the set-piece things had tightened up; an early messiness in the scrummaging had been expunged, despite the fact that one team had had a reduced pack – it was a much more stable platform for both teams now. Lineout-wise neither team was a particularly well-drilled machine, with a lot of ball lost and a lot of skewed throws. It had been scrappy before but after the interval things really got grubby. Neither Oriel nor Keble boast big packs at the moment, but both put an emphasis on being competititive at the breakdown and in the tackle and this meant a gruelling game for forwards and not a lot of good quality ball for the backs.
A Keble try was disallowed early on in the half - the referee unable to sprint 40 yards down the pitch alongside the winger to see if he’d grounded the ball - before a five-metre scrum immediately afterwards led to a try from King. But Oriel answered quickly with a try of their own. The momentum certainly seemed to be with Oriel now, though both sides were putting in hardened, blood-and-guts performances, and they were threatening for the rest of the half as Keble were forced by injury and tiredness to put on several neophytes in the forwards.
Mauls that would’ve been nullified in the first half were taking Oriel thirty yards down the pitch by now, and Keble were on the back-foot. A try in the far left corner was followed by another and were it not for conversions the affair would’ve been much tighter, Oriel only managing to put one between the uprights. Keble experienced a late upsurge and camped themselves inside Oriel’s half for the last ten minutes, neither side about to try anything fancy at this point, the game reduced to a slugging-match between weary fighters. A long second half finally ended and triumphant Keble flanker Matt Gompels gave it the big one and booted the ball halfway down the South Parks Road.
Not a game for the purists then, but aficionados of rucks, tough tackles and hard yards would’ve found a lot to their taste at Uni Parks on Tuesday. The first league now looks likely to be Keble’s to throw away, but both teams emerged with credit to their name in what rapidly turned into a real endurance test of a match.
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