Bolton Struggle Down ‘Dale

As per new faces where crammed into the convoying cars, surprisingly including the girls car brought along by fat captain Nick ’20 minutes’ Sandbrook. Those new faces being young one Matt Veal, old timer Chris Hughes and a student fullback I can unfortunately only apply the moniker of Phish to, no fear I shall save my super witty Ben and Jerry’s related joke for a later instalment.

Bolton got off to an excellent start gathering the kick off (eventually…) and stringing together what must have been 15+ phases of play. However the end result was a flowing Rochdale backs move and try as well as injury forcing Bolton to put Mr Glass V2 Nick Sandbrook onto the field, something I am sure all will agree no-one wanted to see. The injury also saw a pack shuffle as Chris ‘Nick Bridges’ Turner stepped up into the front row and David ‘Noooooo I’m really a back row, honest’ Ormes had to move back into the second row.

Despite fighting hard Bolton where undone by a sizeable pitch and unorganised defensive line as Rochdale pulled out a lead with 3 (or 4 really Rick is it that hard to write this stuff down?) more tries. Long story short Rochdale piled on the points. With the end of the half approaching Bolton finally sparked to life, Mark Crow stealing ball for fun in the scrums gave the backs a platform to strike with Santo ‘you really need to calm down’ O’Brien breaking the line to score. Matt Veal adding the conversion. With the half coming to a close Veal added a penalty to close things up a little.

H/T

The second half started brightly with good running from fullback Phish and Stuart ‘Aww me shoulder’ Evans proving a consistent danger to Rochdale. Boltons pressure leading to a try for Matt Veal (conv missed). Despite their best efforts and going close three times to a score, with a push over scrum, a Richard Dent try being given and then taken away by a linesman of outstanding character and a 50/50 forward pass Bolton couldn’t add to their tally while still leaking tries.

Despite a fair result Bolton can feel aggrieved by the margin of defeat but never let heads drop. Defensively we never got it together as in previous matches and were put to the sword as a result.

F/T Score: Rochdale 2nd 41 v Bolton 2nd 15.

Fraser Hart MOM: Richard Dent