If this had been a boxing match, the referee would have stopped the contest early in the second half. Hawks were so far ahead – fitter, stronger, faster, smarter and more intelligent – that it was a cruelty that Jed-Forest had to carry on for the full 80 minutes.
The Borderers weren’t helped by the needless red-card picked up by No.8 Darren Gillespie around the half hour mark for a second nasty piece of foul play, plus two other yellow-cards shown to Connor Hogg and Gregor Young, but even if they had kept 15 men on the park for the whole game it wouldn’t have been enough to make this a genuine sporting challenge.
Hawks grabbed an early lead with a Ross Thompson penalty and got the first two of their six tries through number eight Gary Adams and hooker Grant Stewart before the break, then ran away with it in the second-half with scores from Sam Yawayawa, Paddy Boyer and Bobby Beattie, plus a penalty try.
The winning team showed a level of ruthlessness which has been conspicuously absent during the second half of this Premiership season, when they slumped to nine consecutive league defeats to wash up second bottom in the Premiership table. A perverse fixture schedule meant that they had to wait seven weeks to play Jed, who finished second in National League One, to decide who will be in the top flight next season. The Anniesland men clearly made good use of the break.
“We got back together, we got a closeness that we needed to get, we had a couple of honest conversations and we pulled ourselves in the right direction,” explained head coach Finlay Gillies.
“The boys have been digging deep – coming in Tuesdays, Thursday and Saturday mornings – we’ve been doing cross-fit classes at 7am on Saturday morning to make sure they are as fit as they can be – they’ve done every little thing that has been asked of them to make sure they are a Premiership club next year.”
Hawks were one of the teams to miss out last Tuesday when the SRU named their teams to take part in the new Super 6 league which kicks-off the season after next. After this performance and result it is hard not to wonder if it is mistake not having a team from Scotland’s biggest city in the competition.
“Hawks have this attitude where people don’t like us – they say we have no history – nobody wants us to win. We’re not like these old clubs such as Jed, who had loads of people come out to watch them today –we’re a performance club and we know our job is to develop talent for Scottish rugby, and that is exactly what we are trying to do. It was tough to have that taken away from us this week, but we’re still fighting. We’ll still be a Premiership club next year,” concluded Gillies.
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