Bears Disappointed in Loss to All Golds

By Ben Masters

The Coventry Bears matched up against Gloucester All Golds in the first round of the Ipro Sport Cup today at Butts Park, which ended with a score of 24-48.

The Bears kicked off to Gloucester showing great confidence and enthusiasm, however a slight gap in the Bears defensive line let slip the All Golds stand off, Brendon Newton for the opening try in the 2nd minute.

This did not however affect the Bears spirit to keep driving forward which resulted in bringing back three tries from two accurate grubber kicks in to the opposing try zone and an offload to the winger to put down in the left corner.

All Golds however managed to collect two more tries and all to be converted before the half time whistle. Leaving the score 14-18 with Bears trailing.

The second half kicked off with hard-hitting tackles and strong hard line runs from both sides. In the opening minute the All Golds interchange Morgan Evans scored from an offload and run with the All Golds scoring a further two tries in the following eight minutes.

The Bears, down at this point at a score of 14-32, progressed to show great resilience to not give up. The Bears tackled hard and held up the All Golds on countless occasions.

The All Golds continued to score a further 3 tries from gaps in the Bears defense and pick ups from kicks making the score 14-48.

The Bears however managed to pull back 2 tries from Hayden Freeman and Jamahl Hunte in the closing minutes.

Speaking after the game Head Coach Tom Tsang said

"I thought we opened up pretty strong in the first 20 minutes and we controlled the ball really well, and obviously that was reflected in scoring three tries early on. We made a few changes and I don’t know if that upset the balance a little bit, but they obviously worked quite hard to get back into it." 

"I would have been happy with just leading by two points but obviously we threw the error, the intercept that they went and scored off to change the momentum just before half time, that was obviously a big turning point in the game. And then I think the biggest turning point though was early in the second half where we opportunity to score it got disallowed and then they went up the other end and scored themselves so, you got pretty much a twelve-point swing. I think that played on our players’ minds and they kept hold of that for a few, probably 10-15 minutes and by the time they shook themselves out of it the game was gone."

"We’ll just sit down and have a look at the video; we’ll see what combinations worked and which ones didn’t, where we need to work on. But its early in the season so there’s no panic stations here it’s just a case of working on the small processes."