Cleckheaton 0 - 20 Darlington Mowden Park

After last week’s inexplicable loss of form and attitude Cleckheaton’s preparations for this week’s visitiors, Darlington Mowden Park were not helped by unavailability and suspensions with the result that there were four new faces in the team along with three positional changes.

However the selected forwards all looked to have the experience for an encounter against one of the leagues bigger packs, although the backs did look to lack the experience factor, with the oldest player being twenty-five years of age.

Park on the other hand had lost their captain Danny Brown to a broken arm sustained in their previous fixture but were strengthened by the inclusion of Peter Taylor ex-Harrogate and Combined Services, and Parks player /coach, for his first game of the season.

It was soon clear that the bigger Park pack was going to be force to be reckoned with.

Cleck were for the second week on the trot strangely hesitant in their first up tackles, this allowed the visitors to dominate the early exchanges and create forward momentum for their young backs, fortunately for the home side the Park handling was erratic and solid defence from Matt Piper and Rhys Jackson in the centres enabled the opposition to be kept at bay.

With twenty minutes gone both sides had taken speculative penalty kicks at goal with no result and play remained in the middle of the field .At this point Park must have made the collective decision to curtail their ambition out wide and concentrate on forward dominance. Whilst Cleck were winning their fair share of line-out ball they became increasingly under pressure in the scrums and mauls allowing Park to establish and keep good field position. A series of rolling mauls edged Park nearer to the Cleck line, skipper Paul Turner was yellow carded for pulling a maul down and from the ensuing 5 metre catch and drive the depleted defenders allowed Peter Taylor to barge his way over for the opening score in the 35th minute. The kick failed , Cleck chased the restart well and caught Park’s full back in possession , in turn he failed to release the ball but from the resultant penalty almost in front of the posts, Ross Hayden contrived to hit an upright for the half to finish in Park’s favour 5-0.

The restart boded well for Cleckheaton as a kick and chase from Joe Massarella forced Park back into their twenty two , Park already down to fourteen men illegally slowed the ball down and lost another player to the bin .Faced with depleted numbers in the Park pack Cleck elected to go for a pushover try from ten metres out rather than catch and drive at the corner, made a complete hash of the possession and after some appalling passing found themselves immediately back on their own line where Ralph Appelby added insult to injury to score wide out .

This score was in the 56th minute, after that Cleck seemed to loose all their shape and intensity. Park kept up the pressure and added a further ten points but it could have been more as a re-shuffled back line caused by scrum half’ Ollie Depledge’s departure due to aggravation of his previous week’s ankle injury, started to look extremely leaky in defence .Only last ditch tackles managed to keep the score down.

After showing improving if not winning form in their first six league fixtures the last two home games have been, to say the least, been
disappointing, Constant changes in personnel within what is a small squad does not help, but it is vital that the collective will shown against Birkenhead Park is recaptured sooner rather than later.