Never count out the Great Firsts.
The latest epic comeback by the Labatt’s Cup provincial champions at the St. Albert Rugby Football Club was Thursday’s 39-30 heroics against the Nor'Westers after it looked like a lost cause down by 22 points in the opening 20 minutes.
The shock and awe result also nailed down a semifinal berth while punting the Nor’Westers out of playoff contention in round two of the six-team Alberta Cup fixtures.
“We underestimated how fired up these guys would be. They needed that game to win and we were a little flat so it took us a while to take a couple of punches and wake up and come back at them,” said prop Angus (Gus) MacDonald, the team captain for the match the SARFC first 15 could ill afford to lose after gassing last weekend’s 49-48 wacky affair against the non-playoff Hornets in Calgary.
“This one was a gut check for our season. We needed to come out of it with a win,” said MacDonald of the fourth-place SARFC squad, 2-2 in round two and 7-4 overall.
The Nor’Westers (0-4, 4-7 overall) came out throwing haymakers offensively while connecting for three impactful tries during a 13-minute span after starting off the scoring spree with a penalty kick from the 22-metre line in the fourth minute.
“We were back on our heels in the first 20 minutes and it was just a couple of big hits and a couple of big plays on defence that got the guys excited and we started working on offence,” said winger Matt Jarvis, one of three try scorers to close out the first half as SARFC climbed back into contention to trail by three at the break.
The players never stopped believing in themselves while refusing to lose.
“We made a few mistakes, but nobody got on each other and then the first thing that was positive the boys got behind each other, and it just kept building from there,” MacDonald said. “When we got our first score the boys kept building and building, and we carried that through halftime.”
The dramatic reversal of fortune was triggered by the first of two tries by scrumhalf Rhys Peters in the 23rd minute. A lineout ball from inside the 22 by MacDonald to jumper Cam Larson was quickly distributed to Peters and the Australian import zigzagged his way under the posts with changes of pace for Brian Fitzpatrick to kick the easy conversion.
After the kickoff to SARFC, almost every one of the 15 players touched the ball while working it into scoring range, as heady runs by Joe Casella, Fitzpatrick and Peters kept pushing the Nor’Westers backwards before the right-to-left passing sequence of Peters to Robert Blunden to Matt Herod led to the newly married Adam Bontus finishing off the team try in the 27th minute. Fitzpatrick’s conversion attempt from a tough spot was unsuccessful.
With about five minutes left in the half, Jarvis hugged the touchline during a run for the try under the post for Fitzpatrick to convert.
“I was in tight of the sideline and Nathan (Yue) gave me a great off-load, we call it a tip line off, and he just gave me a perfect pass and I had one or two guys to beat right and I had just enough space to do it,” said Jarvis, who leads the team in tries this season with at least one in nine out of 11 matches.
The first half ended with Bontus splattering the most dangerous Nor’Wester into the pitch with a thunderous smash-up around the halfway line near the side of Nor’Westers' bench. The non-penalized collision drew the ire of a vocal Nor’Westers’ fan as she stood on the touchline directing her displeasure toward the referee, Bontus and everybody else in a SARFC jersey, resulting in Casella and Herod politely urging her to stay calm, keep quiet and sit down.
Three minutes after the break, the Nor’Westers padded their lead to six points with a penalty kick from inside the 40-metre line.
SARFC responded big-time with two converted tries eight minutes apart and a pair of long penalties by Fitzpatrick to make it 39-25 with 10 minutes to play.
Larson lowered his head with a burst of speed to crack the try line shortly after the penalty kick by the Nor’Westers. The play was set up by Duncan Maguire advancing the ball deep for a two-on-one scoring opportunity with Jarvis that backfired with a mis-timed pass, but SARFC recovered the ball to swing it toward the middle for the lanky forward to run it in from a short distance.
Eight minutes later it was Peters, arguably the best player on the pitch for the winners, who emerged from a cluster of bodies outside the five-metre line with the ball and tiptoed it in for Fitzpatrick to convert the try under the posts.
Fitzpatrick officially squashed the Nor'Westers' playoff aspirations with two riveting penalty kicks from Ashley Hanson distance. The ball placements were between the 40 and halfway lines, with the second farther by a couple of yards, and both were impressive boots down the pipe.
The 21-year-old Irish import has quickly established himself as the team’s MVP in his rookie season despite the alarming number of yellow cards the standoff has racked up while trying to figure out the Rugby Alberta brand of officiating.
The beleaguered Nor’Westers, clearly rattled by the startling SARFC turnaround, ended the match with an unconverted try.
“We still need to put 80 minutes together but that 60 minutes is something we can be really proud of,” MacDonald said.
Bounce-back win
Overcoming the long odds against Nor’Westers, who SARFC beat 39-21 in round one of the Alberta Cup and 29-7 in last year’s Ken Ann Cup north final for a provincial berth, was similar in nature to the triumphant conclusion to the Gareth Jones Memorial Game against the second-place Calgary Canucks (3-1, 7-2 overall) Aug. 17. SARFC rallied from an eight-point deficit with 10 minutes remaining to knock off the Canucks 24-22 on Fitzpatrick’s penalty kick on the last play of the match.
“With the Nor’Westers, the last four or so years they’ve been our big rivals, and with the Canucks it was a memorial day (at SARFC) so emotions were running high for both games,” Jarvis said. “If we can harness that emotion every game then we’ll be pretty good going forward.”
SARFC was on edge of missing the playoffs after the debacle against the Hornets (1-3, 4-5 overall) so the urgency to beat the Nor’Westers was higher than the Canucks.
“It’s nice to get a win against one of the top teams in Calgary, but this is way more important for us because it secures our season moving forward,” MacDonald said. “This one was a little more desperate. Some guys just expected we would come away with a win against the Hornets and that would lock down the playoffs or us, and the Hornets weren’t ready to roll over and they won on the last play of the game because we just expected them to respect that we should win.”
The disappointing loss to the Hornets “was like the first 20 minutes here. We weren’t making the tackles,” Jarvis said. “We would score two tries and then we would let them score two tries. We just couldn’t keep our foot on the gas pedal. We just let them stay in the game for too long and it caught up to us in the end.
“We had penalty advantage on their five-metre line with probably a minute left and we took a stupid penalty and they marched the ball down the field and scored a try to be down by one and good old (Antony) Fitch hit the conversion to win,” Jarvis said of the former SARFC player who nailed all seven try conversions while the visitors scored eight tries in total.
Different lineups every match for a variety of reasons, most notably through injuries (“We've lost key guys,” Jarvis said) hasn’t stopped SARFC from grinding out the heart-pounding results.
“We’re staying resilient and just making sure we're giving ourselves a chance to win every week,” said Jarvis, 32.
The last match before the Sept. 21 semifinals is next Saturday against the third-place Strathcona Druids (2-2, 8-3 overall) as two bonus points separate the teams. Kickoff is 4 p.m. at Lynn Davies Rugby Park.
“It’s going to determine who is three and four (in the Alberta Cup table),” said MacDonald, 33. “We'll keep building on the positives and go give them a good game.”
