Petersfield 3rd XV (45) v Portsmouth 4th XV (24)
After a series of cancellations by proposed opposition teams, Field’s 3rd XV could be forgiven for not knowing who they were finally going to face until they walked on to the pitch.
However, some tenacious organisation finally settled on an encounter with south coast rivals, Portsmouth.
Pompey had the bulk of the early play and were first to score. The visitors had set up camp on the left-hand side of Field’s 22 and were ramping up the pressure. It seemed only a matter of time before they would score and, sure enough, when Field were penalised for a transgression at the breakdown, they took a quick tap to dive across the line.
Field began to work their way back into the game as the side’s new faces settled themselves into the team. At the end of the first quarter it was Field’s turn to cross the whitewash as Hopkins broke from halfway to score the first of his hat-trick of tries. Timothy stepped up to claim the extras, as he was to do on four more occasions to set an impressive 70% conversion rate. It took another twenty minutes before the next score; Field secured good lineout ball 5m from the Popmey line and set up a drive to the line. Scrum-half Harrington fed the ball to waiting flanker, Faulkner, who crashed over. Field’s joy was not to last long,
however, minutes after the restart Pompey had scored again with an almost identical move to their first try. The half ended with honours even at 12-points apiece.
Field started the second half at high speed and racked up 33 unanswered points in the third quarter as Hopkins completed his trio of scores and was joined by Timothy, who took a brace, and Sydenham who added one more with a breakaway and footrace belied his flu-ridden appearance. Field showed they had the pace in the backs to exploit gaps within the Pompey defence, indeed Hopkins second try was the mother of all mazy runs as he started on the left wing before carving his way across to the right, before cutting back inside to finish under the posts.
In an otherwise friendly game, the referee lost his patience with persistent infringement by both teams as first Petersfield and then Pompey lost players to the sin bin, the former for “in at the side” and the later a minute later for ”chopsing”.
Towards the end of the game Pompey got their second breath and gathered themselves to score twice more in the final ten minutes to add some respectability to the final score.