In the winter sunshine, on Sunday 21st November, at Basildon’s Gardiner Close grounds, Basildon and Thurrock RFC served up a very entertaining u16 game of rugby.

Initial exchanges were ferocious as both teams worked each other out and Thurrock led 7-5 after ten minutes. However, four Basildon tries and two conversions later, Basildon led 29 -7 at the interval. Suddenly, all that early cohesion and aggression from Thurrock had gone missing in their game.

The third quarter carried on in a similar vein with Basildon running in three more tries to Thurrock’s one Mitchell Lilley try in response 12 – 49.

However, these Thurrock u16s never give up and in the final quarter, Tees’ 14 players realised that rugby is a team game and they worked very hard to get the ball to Tees’ try talisman, Mitchell Lilley, who only needed a half chance to convert. Tees dominated the exchanges in the final quarter and scored five tries (Lilley 2, Overy 1, Diakite 1 and Martorana 1) without response to make the final score a respectable 34 – 49.