The least said about this the better. For Burnage this was a fine performance by a side playing at the top of its game. For Beverley the score says it all.
For them it was simply a bad afternoon all round and the final whistle could not come soon enough. It is hard to remember a Beverley side being so completely overwhelmed although in some mitigation it should be said that they were up against an altogether bigger and slicker set of opponents as well as being without several of their own senior players. But a rout it was none the less.
Things started to go wrong for Beverley in the opening minutes when Junior Tupai was yellow carded for dangerous play and in his absence Burnage quickly took a 14-0 lead. The two converted tries resulted from penalty lineouts and powerful drives to the line, the second from some twenty metres out. Beverley briefly responded with their best spell of the game. For five minutes they pounded the home line. Dave Brant with a quickly taken tap penalty nearly got there and numerous pick and drives close to the line almost brought tries. But Burnage’s smothering defence was outstanding and eventually they got clear.
After that it was all downhill for Beverley. Burnage raised their tempo with some superb running and support play and looked likely to score whenever they had the ball in their hands. On twenty minutes their pack drove over in the corner for a third converted try. It was obvious even at that early stage that it was all over for Beverley. In the space of ten minutes Burnage then took their score to forty seven with four further tries, two handed to them on a plate by some inept Beverley passing.
The only question at halftime was whether Burnage would top the hundred point mark and few would have betted against it. Burnage indeed started the second half where they left off the first. Within eight minutes they had added another two converted tries. In Ralph Lawson at number eight they had the game’s outstanding player and by the end he had powered his way over for a hat-trick of tries. Beverley’s resistance steadily crumbled as the scores mounted and the hard running home backs found it easy to break through some increasingly dispirited defending.
Beverley could get very little possession of their own and what they did get they could make very little of. Fiddling about in their own 22 instead of clearing the ball to touch several times merely added to their problems. The pack stuck at it bravely but they were regularly pushed back in the scrums. The only crumb of comfort – if indeed there was one at all – was that today the lineout worked well and was back to its best after an indifferent afternoon against Lymm.
Four more converted tries brought Burnage to within eleven points of the hundred with ten minutes remaining. Then the best try of the day, started from behind their own goal line, took them to within four. Beverley had several opportunities to go for goal with penalty kicks but opted instead to go to the corner, which was an enterprising decision but ultimately one which eventually left them with a blank score at the final whistle.
In the dying minutes Burnage substitute Tony Lymm raced over from halfway to take Burnage triumphantly over the 100 points mark. Fifteen tries scored, most of them pretty good ones, and all but one converted. Adam Knight slotted six in the first half and Ross Whinney eight in the second. One surprising feature of the game was that there were no penalty attempts at goal.
But the biggest surprise of all was the nature of Beverley’s disappointing showing after the steady improvement of recent weeks and they will badly want to re-group before next week’s encounter with high flying Sheffield Tigers. Perhaps this was just one of those days but it was unquestionably one best forgotten.
Burnage RUFC 103 Beverley RUFC 0 | Reported by John Nursey
