Bruff 6 Belfast Harlequins 7

Happy Christmas Harlequins.

Well apart from the following:

Question: How can a team with complete dominance in the scrum, complete destruction with any serious backline attacks against a basically non-existent defence, with 80-85%  of the attacks (I’ll confirm when we check the stats but my gut says this is about right), lose a game????
Mind you Harlequins at time could break and punch holes when they needed to.

Answer: Fluff good two aon one and three on one opportunities, Have tries disallowed, and Miss five kicks at goal. That’s how.

Ignore the gamesmanship that meant uncontested scrums when we were just about to land the Harlequins pack into the middle of Kyle Crossroads for the third time in two minutes. Ignore cynical play throughout the game that should have been punished with yellow cards quickly followed by reds, Ignore not being given a penalty try for a blatant pull down of a player on his way to touching down after a kickthrough (Maybe the cover would have got there, that’s a call by the ref). Ignore claims of shortsightedness, just ignore all that. You have to live with what happens on the day.

This game should have been over after thirty minutes. We should have been twenty points up at that stage. You cannot waste try opportunities at this level. You just cannot miss five penalties and hope to bring it home.

We were thirty points better than Harlequins everywhere except on the scoreboard.