Former Pupils given a lesson by Tip Top Toon

JKC BMW sponsored Ballymoney 1st XV entertained Belfast High School Former Pupils on a glorious December afternoon at Kilraughts Road. Ballymoney were virtually unchanged from their previous fixture with Gary Pattison returning for the unavailable Soupy Linton .
High School kicked off and were immediately on the back foot as Ballymoney settled into their game very quickly and within minutes were ahead after a charge down from Nevin the ball fell to Bleakley who opened the scoring with outhalf Young adding the conversion.
Straight from the restart the ball again broke to Bleakley who ghosted through a gap in the defence to run half the length of the pitch to score his second, again converted by Young.
A penalty conceded for going in off the feet at rucktime gave High school a penalty which they decided to kick for posts bringing score to 14-3.
Gary Pattison then got on the score sheet, followed by Nigel Nevin with the bonus point try ,converted by Young.
With the 5 points in the bag, Ballymoney continued to dominate, constantly finding holes in the away defence , the visitors had precious little to offer and couldn’t cope with the intensity of the home side. Wave after wave of attack led to scores from Kenny McAneaney,Matthew Steele and a brace from Nathaniel Steele with Andrew Young converting all left the halftime score 54-3 in favour of Ballymoney.
Shortly after the restart , one of the High School players suffered a broken leg from an accidental collision in a ruck and play was stopped for a while as he received treatment .
After play resumed , 3 more tries from Matthew Steele, Chris Watson and Peter Irvine ,again all converted by Young , the referee blew up with approximately 15 minutes left on the clock .
Understandably, coaches Hanna and Clelland were delighted with the result.
“We started the game with a very high intensity ,bringing the structures we had worked on in training to the fore today and we never gave them a chance to get into the game .With the points secured early on ,it gave us an opportunity to keep working on our moves and we carried them out to great effect. We have a difficult away trip to Virginia next week followed by PSNI after Christmas so we want to keep this high level of performance up .Our opponents were literally unchanged from our first league game so today it has shown us how far we have improved from the start of the season but this is because of the hard work on the training field”
"Our best wishes go to the High school player who unfortunately broke his leg today and we hope he has a speedy recovery from his injury"