Epping Upper Clapton v Maldon 18.10.14

Following on from last week’s victorious match against Millwall, Epping & Upper Clapton welcomed Maldon to the first of our two leagues fixtures against them. Saturday’s weather provided an unexpected bright and warm autumnal afternoon.

The teams take to the park and the Maldon pack look a useful set of players. Early pressure from both sides in great weather sees Maldon take an early lead. Further exchanges and Epping attract penalties against them for a number of sloppy ‘school boy’ errors. Some excellent phases of concerted play kept the men in red and white firmly away from even a sniff the Maldon 22, which unfortunately resulted in scoring opportunities being a dim and distant dream at this point of the match. Finally after some superb defence from the constant probing and digging attacks by Maldon, they were rewarded with an unconverted try.
This concession of points appeared to awaken the troops, who had thankfully been able to weather the on-going storm of attack from Maldon, this renewed passion and energy was rewarded with two quick converted try’s, to finish the first half 14-13 up, much to the surprise of our guests, who had made tremendous use of our trailing score line for the majority of the first 40 minutes, in no small way thanks to the vision and spatial awareness of the young Maldon 10.

Following on from a calm and reflective half time team talk, three strategic substitutions were made to up the ante and make use of the fresh legs to target opportunities and areas that had been missed and ignored in the first half. The previous end to end play was gradually minimised to concentrate on playing our game in our opponents half, partly the result of a reshuffle in positions and partly the result of growing confidence, fuelled by the flow of additional points from tries and conversions from a selection of forwards and backs.

Final score 35-13

Next week we play our second away fixture of the season with a visit to sunny (hopefully) Burnham on Crouch.