by Paul Cook –

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Sydney University 43 (Angus Roberts 2, Jake Gordon 2, Paddy Ryan tries; Angus Roberts 3 cons, 4 pens) defeated Manly 29 (Ethan Uili, BJ Hartmann, Josh Turner, Junior Palau tries; Sam Lane 3 cons, pen) HT 18-19
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The last time these two sides met, Manly put the Students out of the 2015 competition in the semi-finals with a comprehensive 20pt victory at a jubilant Manly Oval. But having started the new season minus a host of last season’s stars, they were looking to take down a rejuvenated Uni side, who were buoyed by the presence of a few bye-free Waratahs. A fast start, a half-time lead and an 11pt advantage at one point with Uni losing a man to the bin, looked like the platform for another Marlins success. But this young Uni side is coming of age very quickly, and they held their nerve to come back and run out 43-29 winners in what was an exhilarating clash (read the full match report here). Rugby News got the post-match reaction from the sheds…

Sydney University head coach Tim Davidson:

“Watching Manly over the weeks that they’ve been playing, they really capitalise on mistakes but they’re good enough to force you into doing things that you don’t want to do and producing an error, and then they are very creative with Sam Lane, who has a very good sense of where to get the ball to, in order to maximise the effect of turning that ball over. We think we’re playing well and then ‘bang-bang’, they’ve scored a couple of tries from creating magic out of our turnovers, so full credit to them. The crowd, the atmosphere – they grow an extra leg here Manly – and they’re a good side and I don’t think they’ve lost here for a while. You never win well down here, it’s always hard, and that’s a credit to what they’ve built as a team and as a club.

“I spoke to the group before we came out here today and I said to them that I don’t care about the result, but what you add to the identity of the club and what we’re trying to create this year is more important. There’s going to be tough times where teams like Manly come at us, there’s going to be crucial moments in the game where you’re going to need to stand up and there’s going to be times where you’re going to be asked questions and that was one of them (Tanginoa’s yellow card). And instead of imploding, they got around each other and wanted to stay in the fight and show a bit of resilience, and I told them afterwards that I was more proud of that than the result. If you don’t have that mentality at this time of the year, it’s very difficult to find it.

“Maybe it’s timing but we’re just lucky to have guys coming back from Super Rugby. You make your own luck and the good thing is, they’re willing to come back and contribute, they don’t just go through the motions, they clearly put in an effort that shows that it means something to them to come back and play club rugby. Yes, we were able to use them as a weapon, particularly at scrum time, but there has to be the effort there, and they turned up and got stuck in. It probably showed the difference in our game, we still made mistakes but if your set-piece keeps you in the game, you know you’re going to be there or thereabouts when the whistle goes. It is a marker in the sand and I guess we’re going to have to be better as the year goes on because if we play Manly again, I know that if we make the mistakes we did today, it’ll be a different result. We got away with it today but if we play the same way against them again, they’ll hurt us.”

Young Manly flyer Josh Turner streaks away for his 1st half try – Photo: Shane Kennedy

Manly head coach Damien Cummins:

“I think there’s only one way to play Uni and that’s to match their game, and it’s no different to the way we want to play. We want to get off the line hard in defence, carry direct and get good go-forward – there’s no team that doesn’t want to do that – but they did it well and created some space out wide. Maybe our tackle focus was a little bit high because they’ve got some big carriers in Will Skelton, Paddy Ryan, Jeremy Tilse and Folau Fainga’a. We needed to go lower on them, which was our intention but we just didn’t execute it well.

“We got pumped in the scrum, it’s becoming a bit of an ongoing issue for us, and if you can’t get your scrum right, it’s hard to launch and give your backs any quality ball. The lineout was fine and we competed hard around the edges but to be 19-18 up at half-time, if I was a spectator that walked in and didn’t see a scoreboard, you’d have thought Uni were probably up 25-10 on the balance of play.

“We had a real focus at half-time on a couple of key areas, on getting some power and go-forward and on playing some inside balls instead of using so much width. They did what we said and we went from 19-18 to 29-18 but at the end of the day, we had so many injuries – BJ Hartmann, Ryan Melrose, Jerome Vaii, Junior Palau – and if you add the injuries we got last week with Harry Bergelin, Kava Uitokomanu and Vinnie Baranyi, we just didn’t have the strength in depth off the bench to compare with a Jim Stewart or a Brad Wilkin.

“There were a few key moments where we failed to execute some stuff, a lineout near the end where we just had no structure and no shape to what we were doing, and that’s disappointing. You don’t want to finish a game where it fizzles out and you get beaten and the score doesn’t reflect the actual nature of the game. But there was daylight between how we played today and how we played last week, we took a massive step forward. If we play like that against most teams in this competition, we’ll beat them.”

Angus Roberts bagged a 28pt haul for the Students with another fine performance – Photo: AJF Photography

Sydney University captain Tom Carter:

“They’re a wonderful side, I think Damien Cummins and Brian Melrose have built a really good culture here and I think you saw that they’re not afraid to play. They’re led by a wonderful flyhalf in SamLane and I think that’s the type of footy they’re capable of – electric outside backs and a pretty confident forward pack that love to muscle up. That was a trap we could have fallen into, playing shoot-out footy but we were pretty confident at half-time that if we could hold the football that we’d get a good result.

“You can have as much endeavour as you want but the game is won up front. Set-piece in club rugby is enormous, Randwick showed last week against us that they’ve probably got the best set-piece in the comp alongside Eastwood and Souths so if we want to win the comp, we need to be able to develop a group of players that aren’t in the Super Rugby program, that can still go out and dominate up front like those guys did today.

“It takes courage to be down by 11pts and down a man and keep playing the way we did in that second half, and throughout the club we’ve spoken about having a character and an identity, I think that’s important. The reality is that we don’t get our Super Rugby players back now, today we did which was fortunate, but the club needs to grow and change and we’ve spoken about sticking to what we know and how we’ve trained and on working hard for each other. We’ve challenged ourselves all pre-season and worked incredibly hard and that’s what we want to stand for – it might not be enough to win the comp – but I think it will be good enough to develop footballers that will take this club forward into the next generation for a few years.”