Sherwood Park – St. Albert’s much maligned premier men’s rugby team delivered a strong message in Saturday’s shocking upset of the first-place Calgary Saints in the Alberta Cup fixtures.
“Every team in the league will look at this score and they’ll say, ‘Holy cow! St. Albert’s got their stuff together,’” said wily hooker Paul Flynn after the 50-5 smoke show at Lynn Davies Rugby Park.
The fourth win in nine matches was too good to be true for the inconsistent first 15. It was also the first victory against a team with a winning record this season.
“It’s huge for the club. It’s really massive,” said Angus MacDonald, a bulldozer in the front row at tighthead prop. “It feels like we’ve turned the corner now with this win and it’s upward and onward.”
With the season slowly slipping away, the firsts pulled off a startling performance to spank the 7-2 Saints. It was 29-0 at halftime and 50-0 before the Saints crossed the try line with 10 minutes to play.
It was total domination by the firsts after the Saints missed a penalty kick from inside the 40-metre line in the second minute.
“We came out from the get-go and smashed them. It’s exactly what we wanted to do and we kept it going,” MacDonald said. “We’ve also got guys that can really run with the ball and we were able to put some points on the board.”
A healthy Duncan Maguire, fully recovered from a rash of injuries that curtailed his brilliance on the pitch for a lengthy spell, galloped for two tries and an inspired Jake Robinson at scrum-half quarterbacked the offence with authority and scored a pair of tries off some nifty runs.
British import Antony Fitch kicked the stuffing out of the ball while going 6-for-7 on conversions and split the uprights on a penalty from inside the 22-metre line in the 15th minute to make it 10-0.
The firsts scored off their first deep push of the match, as Irish import Colum Murphy tap-danced his way through the Saints after some diligent work by forward Billy Thomas to open the scoring in the 10th minute.
New Zealand import Sam Norris finished off a perfect lineout ball from outside the 22 for the team’s third try.
Second-half sub Matt Jarvis also scored off a long run.
“The game plan was to kind of suck them in tight and then attack wide and get them on their back foot while we kept going forward,” Flynn said.
The firsts fielded a starting line-up with a number of fresh faces.
“There is tons of potential with the young guys coming up, like Orrin (Farries). He is only 19 and he played a hell of a game. Billy Thomas is 19 and he stepped in and played a whole game,” MacDonald said. “We know we can do it as a team, and with the new coach (Jo Hull) and the new system we play and everything we do we’ve finally figured it out and we’re starting to roll with it.
“The whole season of planning has really kind of built up to this moment in trying to put things together and it feels like it kind of fell into place at the right time today.”
The difference between the biggest win of the season and last month’s 40-25 loss to the Saints in Calgary was the team’s second-half collapse as the firsts gassed a 25-19 lead at the break.
“(Both matches) started pretty similar with the first 40 minutes. We were up and we were hitting them hard and then I think we might have rested on that first 40 and thought it was just going to come,” said MacDonald, who needed six stitches to seal an ugly gash on his beak after getting nailed in the face by a heel in the opening minute of the second tilt with the Hornets.
“This time we knew that first five minutes after the second-half kick off we really had to keep the pressure on and we did that. There was a space where we kind of fell back and they scored some points on us and we need to keep building and not let that happen and not let teams come back in the second half on us.”
The week before Saturday’s match the firsts deserved a better fate in the 34-28 loss to the Calgary Hornets (6-1). It was the seventh-straight win by the Hornets, winners of three of the last four Labatt’s Cup provincial championships, against the firsts, who took it on the chin 58-10 last month by the Hornets at Ellerslie Rugby Park.
“I don’t think the score represented how well we played,” Flynn said of the rematch. “It was very close. We started off the game guns a-blazing and got up 9-0 on them and then, based on mistakes by us, they came back with two tries that they really shouldn’t have had. From then on it was kind of back and forth and in the end they eked out a win by six points.”
The firsts have three matches remaining until the Ken Ann Cup north playoffs kick off as they battle the rival Clansmen (4-3) and the Strathcona Druids (4-3) for a bye in the Sept. 28 north final. The winner goes to provincials Oct. 5 at Ellerslie.
The firsts tackle the Druids on Aug. 24 and the Clan, last year’s Ken Ann Cup champions, on Sept. 7. The two lowest-ranked teams in the north will meet in a Sept. 21 semifinal.
“We’ve really started to hit the ground running and we’re planning on finishing it off strong,” said Flynn, 30. “We have to look at every game as it comes and not look at playoffs at all. The Clan and the Druids are both really good teams and we’ll have a tough go against them but if we play like we played today we can beat anybody.”
The firsts have a break in the fixtures and don’t play again until Aug. 17 against the Calgary Canucks (1-6) at 4 p.m. at Ellerslie.
