ERGS finish strongly to snatch the win in opening Cup match

Despite losing players to injury, including most of their first-choice front five, Enniskillen Royal were expected to overcome Omagh Academy, in Omagh, in their first-round match of the Danske Bank Ulster Schools Cup.

The Group Stages of the Cup is a way of selecting the best of the unseeded teams that will eventually join seeded teams in the knockout competition after Christmas.

Twenty schools have been drawn into five groups of four teams, the five group winners, and best-placed runner-up, will qualify for the knockout stages.

Enniskillen has been drawn in Group E with Omagh, Grosvenor and Regent House.

On the morning of the match against Omagh, Enniskillen appeared to have missed their Weetabix as they lacked energy and were uncharacteristically tentative.

Some of this could be put down to match day nerves, considering the occasion, and compounded by miserably wet conditions.

Despite these factors it was clear that Omagh had carried out their homework on ERGS since losing to them 31-7 in early September.

They were energetic and feisty from the first whistle and put the visitors under pressure in the set pieces, the very areas Enniskillen would have expected to dominate. They pushed the ERGS pack off the ball in the scrums and hounded scrum half, Alex Howe, to the point where getting the ball to the talented Tag Hambly at out half was almost impossible.

They out jumped and out muscled the normally reliable Enniskillen locks, Noah Quigley and Myles Graham, in the line out so that any ball they won was untidy.

This all resulted in very few of ERGS’s attacks going forward but it was balanced by Omagh’s poor ball retention, and the first quarter of the match resulted in a scrappy deadlock with the two sides accumulating 13 penalties and as many handling errors.

A yellow card for ERGS’s strong blindside wing forward, Luke Smyton, who ‘took one for the team’ following a warning from the sharp, but scrupulously fair referee gave Omagh the edge for a short period and they capitalised with a try from the back of a maul by one of their hefty locks. Their out half struck a sweet conversion to give Omagh a seven-point lead in this very tightest of games.

Restored to a full 15, and with a much greater sense of calm, Enniskillen dominated both territory and possession in the second half with Omagh being allowed just a single sortie into the Enniskillen 22 metre zone, and that with the last play of the match.

Even with so much of the ball the usual slick handling of ERGS’s talented backline was absent and uncharacteristic errors frustrated multiple attacks.

With time running out, the team showed great maturity and their burly pack kept punching up the middle of the park forcing the tiring Omagh forwards to continually defend. Soon, signs of the team returning to its mantra of spreading the ball from flank to flank and stretching the opposition, began to reassert itself.

Enniskillen’s first try came from exploiting this strategy. From a line out won on the halfway on one side of the pitch, the backs took the ball up to the Omagh line in the far corner where the ERGS forwards forced Omagh into a mistake at the maul. Prop forward, Cameron Smith, grabbed the loose ball and drove his way over the line.

With only 10 minutes left and trailing by two points, Hambly’s conversion attempt from a metre inside the touch line, had the makings of a key point in the game. Frustratingly for Hambly, his teammates and the many Enniskillen supporters, his valiant attempt landed on the cross bar and bounced back on the wrong side.

Despite this setback the visitors confidence had returned and they put together 11 straight phases of play to take the ball from a scrum on the halfway to a try in the corner by replacement wing Ben McLaren. Hambly’s conversion attempt fell short, but Enniskillen comfortably held out against Omagh’s last minute attempts to get back in the game and finished winners by 10-7.

Omagh will be disappointed to have let this one slip while Enniskillen should feel proud but relieved to have made a successful comeback. The management have a justifiable belief in the team’s ability and coaches Finlay and McCain will be pleased with the composure shown by their players in the second half.

ERGS will need to start their remaining matches with a lot more energy to avoid slipping too far behind against stronger opposition and they will need to address their penalty count if they should progress to the knockout stages. For now, they can be pleased not to have lost a match that was always theirs to win.