Two South Wales Police Men’s Rugby players joked they turned the game around from the bench after the British Police showed late resilience in defeat to the British Army.
PC Tom Davies, who plays at hooker, and officer safety trainer Scott Jones, a fly-half, came on with the police trailing 33-0 at Sixways Stadium, Worcester.
The police side rallied in the final quarter to score three tries in a 33-19 defeat.
“Heads never dropped,” Tom said. “We came off the bench, and the team scored 19 points, so we’ll tell the boys in the pub that we turned it around!”
Officer safety trainer Scott Jones (left) and PC Tom Davies
Scott added: “Yeah, Tom and me will call that a win!”
The contrast in preparation between the two teams was noticeable.
The British Police side met for the first time on the day of the game and had a run-through together a couple of hours before kick-off, while the army had been together for a number of training camps.
Enjoyed
Despite the result, Tom said he thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
“I genuinely loved that,” said Tom, who plays with Scott for Wales, South Wales, and club side Llanharan.
“You have to work hard for 80 minutes against them.
“You could tell just by how structured they are, how much time they’ve had together compared to us.”
He added that greater accuracy earlier on could have changed the direction of the match.
Clinical
“Once we started being more clinical in the 22, especially with our forwards, we scored 19 points in the last 15 minutes,” he said.
“It felt closer than the score suggests. We just weren’t clinical enough in the first half.”
Scott, who won his ninth British Police cap, echoed that assessment, pointing to missed opportunities.
“We had 20 minutes in the first half where we didn’t score a point, where we could have had maybe two tries,” he said. “There wasn’t much for us to lose, coming off the bench, so we just went for it.”
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