Five-Try Alton End on a High Note

Alton's final home game sees them notch their biggest win of the season.

Anstey Park bade farewell to league rugby for another season and tries from Dan Forsyth, Phil White, Jason Grace, Steve Ott and Andrew Davies ensured that Alton won their final home game with something to spare.

It was a match dominated by the filthy conditions, a biting wind and driving rain that continued throughout the game, leaving the pitch a quagmire. The weather may have been perfect for hippos but champagne rugby was always likely to be at a premium.

But Fortune favours the brave, and Alton's courage was amply rewarded: their determination to play creative, running rugby bagged them five unanswered tries and a clean sheet. They gave two defiant fingers to the weather gods.

In such an encounter the victory predictably went to the team with the strongest scrum.

Farnborough tackled until they dropped but they were so overpowered at the set-pieces and so evidently lacking in confidence that from the moment Alton opened the scoring it was always going to be a damage limitation exercise.

Alton's approach from the outset was ambitious - occasionally a little too ambitious for their own good, perhaps - and they sought to throw the ball wide at every opportunity.

Dan Forsyth opened the scoring with a try in the eleventh minute when Johns' blindside grubber ricocheted off the legs of a Farnborough player and Forsyth gratefully gathered and dived over.

The visitors were under severe pressure, particularly at the scrum, and Alton punished them seven minutes later when Boro were penalised at the scrummage. Johns took a quick tap and sent wing White over in the left-hand corner.

Alton could and should have added two more tries: a forward pass denied Alex O'Neil what would have been a fine try after an excellent backs move; and a charging break from debutant centre Jack Price went unrewarded when he went for the line himself with a clear two-man overlap outside him.

Overall, Price impressed with his clever angles, his ability to break tackles and make the hard yards.

Alton's dominance in the scrummage was confirmed nine minutes before the interval when, from a Boro put-in five metres from their own line, they simply shunted the visitors off the ball and Grace dabbed down.

The game threatened to descend into farce as the rain intensified and the pitch began to cut up badly but both sides continued to show willing. Alton showed greater mastery of the conditions,aided as they were by some lamentable ball-retention by the Boro forwards.

Boro came close to narrowing the deficit ten minutes into the second half when Andy Dowan's huge touch-finder set up a fine attacking position for Boro, and a series of drives brought them to within a metre of the Alton line. But hooker Gareth Stewart was stripped of the ball and Davies, of all people, relieved the danger with a beefy left foot.

That chance proved to be the last for the visitors and Alton notched their fourth try when Johns' neat side-step created an opening for Ott on the angle, and the centre had the pace to make the score.

It was Davies, appropriately, who rounded off the scoring eight minutes from the end. when he broke from the back of the scrummage, pinned his ears back and cruised through a tiring Boro defence like a pocket battleship through calm water.

If Davies was the obvious man-of-the-match, then Johns more than warrants a mention in dispatches, having orchestrated three of Alton's tries and kicked splendidly out of hand.

Victory has taken Alton to fourth-from-bottom, a point clear of United Services with one game to play. Alton sign off their league season with a trip to New Milton on 12 April.

Alton: Forsyth (Gill 52); O'Neil (Collins, 68), Price, Ott, White; Johns, Grace; Happel, Parratt (c), Gay; Greenhalgh, Oliphant; MacDonell (Carter, 52), Arundel, Davies.

Tries: Forsyth (11), White (18), Grace (31), Ott (67), Davies (71).

Farnborough (unconfirmed): Moore; Fetigan, Angell (c), Morrey; Dowan, A Ironside; G Stewart, van Dyck, P Blandin, M Allen, G Hughes, N Carroll; K Osbourne, S Crump, A Naeq.