Western Counties West: Falmouth 20-7 Paignton

Falmouth put in a dominant performance against second bottom Paignton to win 20-7 and extend their unbeaten home record in the Tribute Western Counties West on Saturday, writes Joseph Macey.

Tries from Alex Tacchi, Andrew Searle and captain Tom Spiller grabbed The Eagles maximum points and lifted them up to fifth in the table.

Head Coach, Graham Whitmore, said: “After a pretty poor performance last week against Kingsbridge, we were poor defensively where we missed a lot of tackles and there was a lot of system errors, the turnaround in attitude and the hunger and desire to close Paignton’s space down to challenge their skill and to ultimately dominate the collisions was ultimately the deciding factor in today’s game and without doubt the most pleasing part.

“The confidence of playing at home is great with the good volume of spectators that we have but the challenge is to replicate that on a consistent basis away from home, we can’t afford to play well one week and fall right off it the next.”

Falmouth had the away side pegged back for large parts of the match but they had to wait until the 18th minute to break the deadlock, from a lineout the ball was forced over by prop Alex Tacchi.

Paignton were struggling to cope and fell further behind after a penalty was awarded against them, Tom Edmonds put it through the posts for 8-0.

The Eagles were in cruise control with the wet and windy conditions seemingly not affecting them as they sprayed the ball about at will.

The home side finished off the half strongly with a try from Andrew Searle, and Tom Edmunds added the extras with a superb kick to give Falmouth a 15-0 lead at half time.

Not long after the restart Falmouth were in again and looking to kill the game off, Tom Spiller running over the line to score.

To the credit of Paignton they didn’t stop working and restored some credibility late on, they were thwarted just before the line but it was recovered and put over. Falmouth saw out the rest of the game to earn a well-deserved victory.

Second row, Trevellyan Ward, said: “We were quite embarrassed with our performance last week but you have to give credit to Kingsbridge they played well but if there is one thing you need in rugby you need to man up and you need to tackle and you need to work hard for your team-mates and we were lacking in that area and we saw a big bounce back today.”

“We played with the wind in the first half and we had to make the most of it because territory was key, lineouts were very tough but it just meant if you were in trouble you could get out of it quite quickly and it was just about being sensible and using it in the right way.”

Packet Pick: Leigh Humphreys

Falmouth: A. Tacchi, O. Church, A. Searle, J. Baglow, T. Ward, S. Somers, F. Dalton, T. Simmons, T. Spiller, K. Rodda, T. Job, T. Edmonds, A. Kindjarsky, N. Carne, L. Humphreys. Reps: A. Bullock, S. Firth, A. Harding.

Falmouth resume action on Saturday, November 17 at Saltash, kick off TBC.