Clinical Pirates Leave Rebels Finals Hopes Marooned

Round 14 Match Report: By Paul Cook

West Harbour have put a serious dent in Southern Districts’ hopes of a second successive season of finals football and prevented a winning start for new coach Steve Talbot in the process by downing the Rebels 31-25 at Forshaw Park. The home side had the luxury of adding new recruits Nick Cummins and Cooper Vuna to their ranks but what was their strongest team of the season on paper failed to gel and struggled to break down the Pirates resolute defence as the visitors racked up a four tries to one victory.

The result also revived Wests hopes of playing on into late September and their chances of achieving that goal would be far greater if Rory Sidey was available for the rest of the season. The Western Force centre was a giant in the midfield battle and showed his class when given the opportunities in attack and the Pirates could be forgiven for hoping his four match cameo before heading back to Perth could be extended.

The Rebels pulled off a late surprise when Cummins, Vuna, Dan Palmer and Graydon Staniforth ran out for the kick-off despite not being named in the midweek team listings. It certainly caught West Harbour coach Andrew Cox unawares, however, the numbers on their relative shirts did offer up a potential target for their gameplan:

“I couldn’t get a team list so I didn’t know who was actually playing until they ran out. They were warming up and we saw Nick Cummins and Cooper Vuna and Rory Sidey said to me ‘They’ve got a 13 [Nicky Price] playing wing and they’ve got a winger [Vuna] playing 12, where do you think we should be going?’

And it was Sidey who struck the first blow when he picked up the scraps from a charge down on halfway to stride over. Shaun Treweek added the extras and the Pirates had the start they wanted but a lot off huff and puff from the home side with little in the way of gilt edged opportunities, did procure 6pts from the boot of Jordan McGregor to narrow the deficit to a point.

The Rebels had plenty of possession but – perhaps as a result of the influx of new personnel – were lacking in combinations and many promising looking phases ground to a halt on the back of a dropped ball, a pass behind a runner or players hitting the same lines and becoming an easy target. It has to be said that their cause wasn’t helped by the impressive defensive work of the Pirates as well, who were up in their faces and tackling to a standstill.

Rebels head coach Talbot, who only met his new team at the midweek training session after replacing Darren Bray (who will now look after youth recruitment and development) conceded that the late availability of the newcomers played a role in the lack of cohesion but admitted that maybe his side hadn’t gone into the game with the right mindset:

“I think we might have underestimated the opposition a bit, they put some really good pressure on us in defence, coming up and taking our space. We had plenty of ball, we just couldn’t get into a rhythm and put any pressure on them, it just always seemed to come back.”

Significant pressure on the Pirates line didn’t produce any reward with a few kickable penalties being turned down in favour of scrums but another mistake from the hosts led to a second try for the visitors. A speculative high ball from full-back Liam Windon was spilt by opposing scrum-half Grayson Hart and Windon pounced to kick ahead into empty space and score under the posts.

The alarm bells were well and truly ringing when Isaiah Pine plucked an intercept out of the air almost immediately after the restart and offloaded in the tackle to Macquire Tatola for try no.3. Treweek’s 100% boot made it 21-6 at half-time and having also lost Brumby prop Palmer to injury, the first 40 minutes had turned into a bit of a nightmare for the Rebels.

McGregor settled his side 2 minutes after the break with a long range penalty but a similar pattern to the 1st half emerged with the Rebels having the majority of possession but very little penetration and their impatience and frustration was evident with the low percentage kicks that all too often wasted any momentum.

Another penalty on the hour saw them back themselves to go the long way around in terms of a comeback as despite being 12pts behind on the scoreboard, captain Tetera Faulkner pointed to the posts. That decision was vindicated somewhat when McGregor slotted his fifth penalty of the game 3 minutes later to leave them trailing 21-15.

However, Wests had other ideas and from almost their first foray into the Rebels half, Treweek and Sidey concocted a defence splitting play that put the rampaging centre through a hole and a neat, no-look pass fed Tito Mua to the line. Treweek added the extras and Sidey felt that the timing of the try was crucial to the final result:

“That can demoralise a team when you score a try like that, especially when they’ve been working so hard and only coming away with 3pts each time. Every time they did kick a penalty, we felt that was a positive and a bit of a compliment.”

With 10 minutes to go, Southos finally chanced their arm and went for broke when Cummins – their biggest threat all afternoon – broke free from a ruck and put a clever crossfield grubber in for Vuna to dot down.

The two sides traded penalties in the last 10 minutes to leave the visitors holding a 6pt lead and it all came down to almost the final play of the day. With the Rebels camped on the Pirates 5 metre line and slowly inching forward for the match winner, referee James Leckie blew his whistle.

For one brief moment, both sets of players seemed to think he’d awarded a try and confusion reined over the arm signal given to accompany the decision. Leckie explains:

“The only person who can pick the ball up from a ruck is the last person in that ruck, if you’re not the last feet of the ruck, you can’t unbind and pick up the ball so I deemed that someone who was not the last player in the ruck picked up the ball and went forward. To be honest, I could have given a better signal for it.”

Thus, the penalty went to Wests and with it – deservedly so, the game.

West Harbour 31 (Rory Sidey, Liam Windon, Macquire Tatola, Tito Mua tries; Shaun Treweek 4 cons, 1 pen) d Southern Districts 25 (Cooper Vuna try; Jordan MacGregor 1 cons, 6 pens) at Forshaw Park. Referee: James Leckie

Final Thoughts…

Southern Districts hooker John Ulugia:

“We did have a lot of ball but we made a lot of mistakes. I think Tetera captained well and made good decisions to go for the points, we just wanted to chip away and see if we could wear them down a bit and score some points after that.

“As a team, we can build on this and hopefully, we can sort out or combinations because the players out there are good enough to work off combinations straight away, it’s whether we apply it on the day.”

West Harbour centre Rory Sidey:

“We were defending quite a lot and it was good that we could hold out and when we did get the ball, we were quite smart with it. I think our structures were working well and with a few changes in their side, you could definitely tell that their structure wasn’t quite there.

“When you’ve got guys that haven’t played together, especially guys who are predominantly wingers playing in the centres, it’s a tough position defensively and tactically so it was definitely the place to target no matter how good the individual is.”

Southern Districts head coach Steve Talbot:

“Today’s a real disappointment, we prepared to win it and the talk before the game was that this was a very important game and we have to put this one away and we didn’t. We didn’t really have a general out there and when the defence is pressed right up on you, I think you have to make some decisions and I don’t think we did that very well.

“We have to look at other results but we basically need to win every game and clock up some bonus points so the pressure’s on.”

West Harbour head coach Andrew Cox:

“We put pressure on at the right end of the field by being aggressive in our defence. The main difference between the two teams was that when they had the ball, we rattled their cage and when we had the ball in good field position, it just seemed almost a foregone conclusion at times that we were going to get over.

“We’ve won three of our last four so we must be doing some things right and I think that what’s happening is that the defensive game and the attacking game are coming together. We’ve been working hard on that as a team and it’s starting to work.”

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