Rugby – This Week’s Rugby Round-up

A mixed week for Edinburgh’s teams saw some big wins, some narrow defeats and the traditional postponement due to an unplayable pitch at Currie.

Edinburgh Rugby

Edinburgh scored four tries against Bordeaux on Friday night (full report in ‘Sports’) to ensure their place in the quarter finals of the European Rugby Challenge Cup. Leading 14-6 at half time, the home side put in a terrific performance in the second half, scoring three tries to Bordeaux’s two – one of which was late on and took advantage of a tiring host – to take the match 38-20, with 28 points – including two tries – coming from Sam Hidalgo-Clyne. The scrum half also, quite rightly, won Man-of-the-Match and, hopefully, his selection in the Scotland squad can lead onwards and upwards.

Club Rugby

BT National League

With Currie’s match off, Boroughmuir, Edinburgh Academicals and Heriots all had home matches to try and enhance their league positions. Unfortunately, none of them could take advantage and all three went down to their opponents.

Boroughmuir played out a 5-3 defeat to Gala, Accies lost out to Glasgow Hawks 27-7 and Heriots slipped up with a close 14-12 loss to Melrose.

In the table, Heriots have had their lead reduced to 10 points, but Melrose, in second, still have a game in hand,

while Currie have dropped to eighth from sixth with 30 points. Boroughmuir and Accies are still ‘holding on’ to ninth and tenth places with 28 and 23 points respectively and are looking like firm favourites for the play-offs.

BT National League, Div. 1

Both Watsonians and Stewarts-Melville both had bonus point wins over Borders’ opposition on Saturday, with the more impressive win coming to Stew-Mel who put 47 points past Kelso on their way to a 47-15 victory. Watsonians didn’t quite manage to match their North Edinburgh rivals – or, indeed, their win over Marr a couple of weeks back – but still came up with a pretty impressive 36-10 win over Biggar.

The two sides are still in third and fourth places with Stew-Mel two points behind second placed GHA with 54 points, followed by Watsonians who lie fourth with 49 points, but have played one more match than the top three.

U20’s International Trial

On Tuesday night, Scotland’s Under 20 side played a Scotland Club XV select at BT Murrayfield in their final training/selection match before their Six Nations campaign which starts on February 7^th away in France.

Leading 18-0 at half time, the first quarter of the second match saw the Club XV side rapidly reduce that to 18-17. However, the U20’s rallied in the final 10 minutes to run in two tries for a not so convincing 30-17 win.

Image – Mike Hanning (Stewarts-Melville) chasing his chip kick through on the way to his hat-trick of tries