Falmouth 17, Sidmouth 26

Falmouth fell to their first home defeat of the season after a 17-26 loss to league leaders Sidmouth in the Tribute Western Counties West league on Saturday, writes Joseph Macey.

The conditions were very difficult, and the match was played in the rain from start to finish, The Eagles pegged Sidmouth back on numerous occasions with a penalty try early on and a try from Nick Carne, but the visitors have had an unbeaten start to the campaign so far and proved too strong in the end.

Head Coach, Graham Whitmore, said: “We weren’t worried about Sidmouth and their league position, everything we had spoken about was about what we could control and about focusing our own performance and the need to have an improved performance from last week.

“I thought that for huge parts of the game we were highly competitive and just very disappointed that we didn’t come out of the game with anything in terms of bonus points or indeed the victory.”

Falmouth came out the traps quickly and broke the deadlock 15 minutes in after they were awarded a penalty try after nice work from Kieran Rodda and Alex Harding.

The game was close, but Sidmouth started to edge their way back in by replying with two penalties to go within a point.

The move of the match came from the foot of Rodda after he saw Carne making a diagonal run into the corner and kicked the ball into his path for him to run over and score, the referee stopped to think but awarded the try. Tom Edmunds added the extras for 14-6.

The game really turned on its head when Falmouth unfortunately lost two of their back row in quick succession to injury and a yellow card for Liam Barkwill after what was deemed a dangerous challenge started to open up space for Sidmouth which they capitalised on to take a 14-16 lead going into half time.

The loss of a man started to show and almost straight after the restart Sidmouth looked to kill off the game with another try to extend their lead.

Falmouth fought hard in the second half and showed great determination to stop themselves falling further behind, but it wasn’t to be their day, a late penalty from the away side all but confirmed the result.

The Eagles will now face an equally harder test with an away trip to second placed St Austell next Saturday, kick off TBC.

Falmouth: A. Searle, O. Church, L. Barkwill, J. Baglow, T. Ward, A. Robinson. F. Dalton, T. Simmons, T. Spiller, K. Rodda, A. Harding, T. Edmonds, A. Kindjarsky, N. Carne, M. Horton. Falmouth reps: A. Bullock, S. Somers, S. Firth.