Glenwood run over English opposition
On Monday, 23 July, Glenwood hosted Hampton School from the UK and beat them 58-0.
Hampton School was founded in 1557 and is thus celebrating its 450th anniversary. Rugby at is of a high quality and former pupils include Simon Amor (England Sevens captain) and Andy Beattie (Bath back row and current England ‘A’ player).
Recent successes include winning the Middlesex Sevens in 2006 and 2007.
Hampton had enjoyed an unbeaten tour so far but, preceding the meeting with Glenwood, had not played a Tier 1 South African school and therefore was naively optimistic about their chances against a team that has not lost in over a year. They would however be brought back down to earth by a lean, mean, ‘Green Machine’!
Glenwood, who denied their English counterparts any space and time the few times they actually retained possession, ran riot as they steamrolled their way to a 58-0 victory.
The tight-phases were totally dominated by the Durban outfit while rucks and mauls were also the domain of the home team. Other than a couple of wasted opportunities amongst the backs, generally they ran with precision and accuracy as well as using deft chips to good effect on a numbers of occasions.
Centre Allen Zungu, fly-half Hennie Swart and lock Brendon Botha picked up a brace of tries each, as Glenwood dotted down 10 times. The kicking was not up to standard and the score could have been stretched considerably if they had been on song.
After a number of ‘warm-up’ matches, the real test lies across road from Loftus Versfeld this weekend as Glenwood travels to Affies. Over 500 boys in 13 different disciplines will be involved at the famous Pretoria school – a great advert for South African sport!
The scorers:
For Glenwood:
Tries: Brendon Botha 2, Kyle Cooper, Marinus Coetzee, Allen Zungu 2, Hennie Swart 2, Andrich Arlow, Dean Muir
Cons: Swart 3, Storm Pearton
By Brendon Liebenberg
