Having seen their fellow members of the Red Devils U16s squad in the Black team defeated in Saturday’s away fixture, the Red half of the squad took revenge in last night’s return fixture with the Centurions to notch up the biggest win of the season.
It is always useful to have the benefit of hindsight, and having some little knowledge of exactly what to expect from the visitors went a long way in enabling the Salford lads to deal with the threat they were facing.
“The priority was focusing upon ourselves , such as ensuring we doubled up on tackles and then worked hard from marker ” insists Player Development Manager, Danny Barton, “but it was also important to highlight certain of Leigh’s strengths, like their inside balls from the shoulder, offloads, and their good kicking game.
“The lads really took it on board and they limited Leigh to only two line-breaks and one offload in the whole game, which was excellent.”
For Leigh, who run just the one team, this was a quite short turn around, but they were able to compensate for this by using a large squad, and frequent interchanges, as players started to show signs of tiring.
“They came with a great deal of confidence, but our lads also turned up with a really good attitude, which made for a much more competitive contest, particularly in the first half, than the score line would indicate, “ iwa Danny’s assessment.
It took a matter of only five minutes for the Red Devils to open their account, when, following a penalty in their favour, Salford were able to apply pressure to their opponents’ line and succeeded in opening the defence for Tumy Onasanya to cross, with Josh Stafford adding the goal kick.
Centre, Lewis Roberts, who had a fine game throughout, was next on the score sheet, and even though the try was touched down in the left hand corner the conversion was again successful, and very soon the score had been stretched to 24-0, with further tries from Morgan Kelly, who combined clever dummy with slick footwork to get over in the right hand corner, and Connor Aspey.
The final score was to be extended somewhat by the highly successful goalkicking of Stafford and Connor Law, who between them succeeded in landing ten conversions from twelve attempts, often from difficult angles.
Just as it was beginning to look as though the home side could score at will, the Centurions regrouped and twice within a few minutes, exploited lapses in concentration to bring the score back to a more competitive 24-10.
A further converted try from half back, Kieron Prescott, shortly before half time, quickly settled any nerves which might have started to develop, and it was a confident home camp which congregated together for the half time discussion.
That confidence was clearly well placed as the second half unfolded with try after try to the rampant Red Devils. Of all those that were scored, Danny picks out one of Cameron Williams’s brace which came as a result of a break from dummy half followed by two well executed offloads , but in truth this was a most creditable team performance in which every player involved performed to their limit to the betterment of the whole group.
SALFORD TEAM & TRY SCORERS
Connor Law, Joshua Stafford (T), Will Timmins, Connor Williams (2), Kieron Roberts (T) , Daniel Stone, Connor Aspey (2), Morgan Kelly (2), Callum Hughes, Tumy Onasanya, Austin Downham, James McKenna, Joshua Henry, Joe Lawler, Lewis Zammit, Peter Adinnu, Thomas Melling, Alex Speakman (T), Ben Gore (T)
