NYM beat Monmouth and then North Jersey to make the finals of the Men's A Division of the Jersey Shore Tournament this past weekend...

The other finalist, Union RFC,  beat out Princeton AC and the Village Lions to get to the championship match. A hard fought match resulted in NYM taking 2nd Place in the Division.

Our first game was a scrappy affair against the hosts Monmouth. It looked like we hadn't woken up. Passes were going behind players and we failed to hustle at penalties or against the maul at times. However, we did just enough to win ugly 6-3. The second game against North Jersey was Henrys revenge game. Our B-side had played them during the spring and got beat well, with Henry suffering a blow to the head and being knocked out. Despite NoJo having a bigger pack our intensity had increased 100-fold from the first game and we consistently rocked them back with line breaks. The support was better, the clearing out was better and the running harder, enabling us to notch a 30-0 win. Our opponents in the final, Union (for the third time this year), had looked good beating Princeton AC and the Village Lions (with a few subs in), their fly half running the show. We concocted a plan to shut him down and just as in the first two games our defense was excellent in this area. However, their forwards were well organized and a set of big units. We gave height to them at the lineout out and weight at the scrum. they were also that bit more aggressive at the ruck. Despite this we turned around only 10-0 down after they had crashed over through their second row and their fly half had slotted a penalty. Unfortunately we lost our shape playing into the wind in the second half and their prop scored twice to kill it off, with one more pucnhed in out wide to hammer the nail in, and win 25-0. Lineouts and scrums were bad all day as we had one jumper and got consistently pushed back or wheeled. Our defense was good but can get even better if we improve our organization. Our passing let us down a few times with players getting anxious and over-running, so points went begging on a couple of occasions. With practice we should get our depth right. However, considering all this and the fact we were down many players it was a great effort. All those who turned up played their guts out and I deliberately didn't single out names because it was a real squad effort. Everyone got significant playing time.

Squad: Brian Eastman, Devon St Louis (Trini), James White, Danny Sonon, Brain Fitzgerald (capt), Ryan (Hot-tub) Hodson, Matt Smith, Ed Brydon, Josh (Choda) Yakatan, Michael Toth, Mike Bury, Henry Williams, Chris (Night-Train) Paul, Scott Crafton, Chris Donatello, Mike Annicelli, Dave Levine, Tom Ogden, Nick (The Greek) Mastrogeorgiou, Andrew Mezo, Matt Persanis, Pete Galen.