Rotherham Titans suffered their first loss of the season with a heavy 50-31 defeat away to Bristol based side Dings Crusaders, on a breezy afternoon at Shaftesbury Park.
Titans collected a try bonus point for their efforts with their five scores coming from Isaac Shaw, Jackson Barling, Morgan Veness Harry Newborn and Mitchell Lacey-Babalola, with Lloyd Hayes adding 6 points from the tee.
The defeat sees Rotherham drop to second in the table one point behind leaders Rosslyn Park on an afternoon where there was a number of surprising results in the division.
Dings fully deserved their victory as they matched Rotherham in all areas throughout the game.
The hosts made a rapid start and raced into a 19-0 lead inside the opening 15 minutes as Thompson, Stanley and knight all crossed the whitewash.
Rotherham responded through full back Isaac Shaw who burst through to give the league leaders hope of stabilising the ship.
However, Dings chose to write their own script and before the break added two further scores through Morris and Rowson to send the hosts in at the break with a huge 31-5 lead.
It was always going to be tough for Rotherham to overturn such a deficit and despite winning the second half, that’s how it turned out.
A Jackson Barling try early in the second half may have given the visitors hope of an unlikely comeback, but that was quickly snuffed out when Dings winger Rowson grabbed his second try shortly afterwards.
The final 20 minutes saw the sides trade scores as Morris and Jenkins crossed for the hosts and to their credit for never giving up Rotherham added three more from Veness, Newborn and Lacey-Babalola.
The South Yorkshire side will now reset, work hard and prepare for the challenge that Tonbridge Juddians will bring to Clifton Lane next Saturday.
Commenting post-match Harvey Biljon reflected:
“First of all, we have to give credit to Dings Crusaders, they clearly had a reaction from their result last weekend, they had a nice little injection of players come in for them, which clearly made a big difference, and at times they out enthused us in moments.
“We can’t get away from that, we’ve had a big couple of weeks and for maybe 50 minutes we were off the pace, and you have to give them credit, they got some great scores, as did we.
“We scored 31 points on the day and when you do that you don’t expect that outcome, but we’ve got to work both sides and today took us a little while to get up to speed.
“There was two or three moments in the first half where we didn’t convert and because we didn’t convert, we were under pressure and in those moments, we’ve got to be better.
“That’s the great thing about this game, as I’ve just said to the players in the huddle, we get to train Tuesday and Thursday and we get another go next week.”
Titans: Shaw (T), Barling (T), Veness (T), Newborn (T), Lacey-Babalola (T), Hayes (3C)
Dings Crusaders: Morris (2T), Rowson (2T), Thompson (T), Stanley (T), Knight (T), Jenkins (T), O’Grady (5C)
Yellow Card: Halliwell (Dings)
Attendance: 531
Referee: Alex Powdrell
Assistant Referees: Emmerson Wood & Dave Philpot
Titans: 15 Isaac Shaw, 14 Jackson Barling, 13 Lloyd Hayes, 12 Travis Gordon, 11 Mitchell Lacey-Babalola, 10 Joe Cummins, 9 Noah Cowan (Broad 54), 1 Alastair Donkor (Toerien 49), 2 Luke Cole (Veness 59), 3 Andrew Foster (Bairstow 59), 4 Curran Maguire, 5 Harry Gilson-Fox (Cole 89), 6 John Okafor, 7 Harry Newborn (Capt.), 8 Fraser Hastie (Gascoigne 54).
Replacements: 16 Morgan Veness, 17 Zach Toerien, 18 Tom Bairstow, 19 Frankie Gascoigne, 20 Sinjin Broad.
Dings Crusaders: 15 Evan Morris (Sol Taufa72), 14 Harry Rowson, 13 Victor Worsnip, 12 George Boulton (Capt.), 11 Sol Taufa (Rivers 70) (Morris78), 10 Lewis O’Grady, 9 Tom Knight (Jones70), 1 Archie Stanley, 2 Tomos Gwilliam (Cantwell 69), 3 Jimmy Halliwell (Ncube71), 4 Will Thompson, 5 Matt Bowler, 6 Kenzie Jenkins, 7 Kofi Cripps, 8 Paddy Pearce (Bilton 69).
Replacements: 16 Sam Cantwell, 17 Brian Ncube, 18 Alex Bilton, 19 Matt Jones, 20 Max Rivers.
