Despite all the other home & away games being frozen off, Bolton 4s and Bolton University elected to go ahead with their Annual Reunion match. A late pitch inspection at 1pm, and on the basis that we're all here anyway, and the game was on. With 31 players all told, players were lent and borrowed, and we were ready to go. The students raced off into an early lead, going 0 - 14 up with tries from xxx and Cairns, before ex-student Gaz Flounders opened the scoring for the 4s, 7 - 14. Cairne added another, 7 - 21 and then Eldin Toplovic went over in the corner to pull one back, 12 - 21. Mitch adds one for the Students, 12 - 26 and then ex-student Ben Tef Hill returns the favour, 19 - 26. Coming up to half time and Andy Jolly bulldozes his way over from at least 2m out, 26 - 26. (Someone else must have scored, cos the ref said it was 31 - 26 at half time).
At half time, some of the students left the field, due to the excesses of the previous night catching up with them, so with some more player swops, the game resumed at 14 a-side.
The second half proved to be one way traffic for the 4th team, with 4 unanswered tries being scored. The first, was quite unbelievable as Stuart 'you can't wear enough protective gear' Macdonald, managed to string together 8 skills in quick succession, (1) be in the right place, (2) catch the ball, (3) run with the ball, (4) sidestep round an opposition player [ok, the ruts on that side of the pitch may have helped him], (5) hand off an opposition player, (6) run through an opposition player, (7) keep running with the ball and (8) dive over the try line to score. It was just a shame that he had no consideration for the kicker and touched down in the corner rather than running it round behind the posts. Further tries came from Flounders, Sackfield and Topalovic.
Men of the Match were Jacob Walker (Bolton) and Mitch (university). Mr Walker won the obligatory pint race.