With the heavy rain of Saturday night, the Letterkenny and Ballyshannon girls took to an extremely muddy pitch in the Glebe. In miserable conditions for a match which was to be a battle of the two Donegal Teams.
Letterkenny started brightly and from kicking off they pressurised the Ballyshannon side and played the first ten minutes of rugby in the Ballyshannon half. Once again the Ballyshannon pack showed their dominance in the scrum, winning a number against the head and once again the “under-19” rule, allowing only a metre and a half
drive. Then after a number of forward phases from Ballyshannon which left them in Letterkenny’s 22 the ball was released to their back line and a few hard hits the Ballyshannon side broke loose and scored a try which was unconverted to put Ballyshannon into a five point lead. Receiving ball from the kick off Letterkenny again worked play back into the Ballyshannon half, with some strong running from Zena Gordon and Vika Vasileka. With Letterkenny being award a penalty in Ballyshannon’s 22, Letterkenny put points on the board as the penalty was kicked over the bar by Edel Melaugh.
The start of the second half was kicked off by Ballyshannon and into the hands of the backs. Laura Kenny passed the ball to Carmel Egan, who from her own half ran at the Ballyshannon side and managed to get past their winger to score a try in the first 5 minutes of the second half. This then brought the score to 8 – 5. The atrocious conditions caused many handling errors which led to the game becoming very broken and the majority of the second half was a scrappy affair with most of it played among the forwards, with hard yards being made by Sylvia Robinson, Cheryl Laverty, Zena Gordon and Vika Vasileka. A great spell of hard rugby from the Letterkenny side. The best passage of play came in the last 15 minutes of the game when Letterkenny finally seemed to come to terms with the horrendous conditions and began to play hard-hitting forward rugby. With Ballyshannon unable to escape the Mud, with great ball retention at the breakdown there was a near constant flow of forwards crashing the ball up, with picks from the base of the ruck, as well as centres Carmel Egan and Donna Redmond, enough space was eventually made for Emily Martin to crash over the line on the final play of the game for an unconverted try to leave the scoreline at 13 – 5. It was not pretty rugby by any means but both sides played a hard game and Letterkenny game out on top which puts them through to the Ulster Development Cup final which is being held on Sunday 12th February against Newtownards and venue still to be confirmed.
All support is much appreciated.
Anyone interested giving rugby a go can contact Anne on 0860618186.
