Not Sevens and no milking it.

Nick Alway reports

It was a hot and sunny afternoon at Tring's Cow Lane, made for backs to revel in and for forwards to cultivate a healthy thirst : the sort of day when coaches usually know that - whatever their best laid plans - there is going to come a point when the urge to play a seven a side game, albeit with fifteen men, may well prevail. With the Stags' proclivity to throw the ball around any way, your correspondent would have put money on this game opening up. However, although the Stags eventually notched up five tries to their hosts' three, they never really fully cut loose and both teams continued to pay due respect to the basics until the final whistle.

Not that the basics were always executed flawlessly by any means and the visiting support must have thought , " Here we go again!" when their team's first line out was comfortably snaffled by Tring. Then on five minutes - after a penalty had beeen kicked deep into Tring's 22 - the intended jumper was comfortably missed again but this time there was to be no Tring intervention : the ball went loose and was instead snaffled by the alert Ben Davies and this untidy sequence had been repaid with a handsome dividend, 0-7 with the conversion.

This was the cue for more fluency in play than had been on show a week earlier and - although ball retention was still an issue - more phases were at least being put together and the Stags dominating possession. Line-outs became much more predictable with jumpers being found by the thrower more or less regularly and - bar one set scrum aberration - all seemed well in that department too.

However it was Tring who profited from some less than robust defence to score next and indeed courtesies were exchanged again before half time so that the interval score stood at 12-14 and Tring on this hot day had the benefit of the Cow Lane topography to come. Yellow cards were coming in to play for the second week running and indeed by close of business CS had again shaded the overall card count giving coach Stefan Smith cause to read the Riot Act later.

Stern words were presumably also spoken at half time, the Stags electing to stay outside despite the still warm afternoon. If so, they did the trick as the CS backs started to come into their own and overall there was now more cohesion . The game never did deteriorate to mere sevens play, thankfully, and three more CS tries were registered and the bonus point gathered in before Tring's never say die efforts were rewarded with a final try of their own to give the scoreline a more realistic appearance.

CS scorers:

Davies
Stephenson (2)
Olima
McLaughlin

Conversions : Hadden (3).