Donaghadee welcomed old foes Coleraine to Donaldson Park for the first time in a number of seasons for a key league game in Kukri Championship 2. Before the game Coleraine lay in 8th place in the table with the Dee two points behind them in 9th. The Dee were still without the injured Paul Johnston & Matthew Mingout, Karl Yellop & Jonny Bell were unavailable and Stephen Adams had sustained a nasty injury in last week’s victory over Academy which will keep him out until early February. On the plus side Danny McBride returned to play on the left wing along with Adam Alexander who replaced Yellop in the centre plus Max Montgomery was available to take up a place on the bench.
Persistent and heavy rainfall during the week, and on the morning of the game, had left the 1st XV pitch sticky but eminently playable.

Playing “up the hill” Donaghadee started strongly and, for the first quarter of the game, kept their opponents firmly pinned in their own half of the field. During this period the Dee had a number of chances to open the scoring but these were spurned due to a combination of strong Coleraine defence, wrong options and a sporadically misfiring lineout. With 19 minutes played Coleraine doggedly made their way down the pitch helped by the strong carrying of Christie and Mullan in back row and eventually the last-ditch defence of the home side was not enough to prevent their opponents scoring an unconverted try at the Clubhouse right hand side. The Dee pack returned to the fray and strong carrying from Ewan McCracken, Ray Dobson, Jack Chesney and Ally Barnes and robust running in the threequarters from Matthew Stockton and Alexander once again had the men from the North West under pressure. Coleraine weathered the pressure however and after 28 minutes ball was turned over in midfield, carried on by Christie before being moved blind to create the extra man in the form of the visiting No. 13 who outpaced the Dee defence to run around in under the posts. Amazingly, the simple conversion was missed by the visitors to leave the score at 10-0. Coleraine now enjoyed their best period of the game and only sterling defence led by Chris Hamilton, Sam Ingham and Montgomery, who had joined the fray, kept the visitors at bay, with no change to the scoreboard as half-time was reached.

The Dee pressed from the start of the second half and were putting Coleraine under severe difficulty as they strove to protect their line. With barely five minutes played in the second period there now followed one of the most bizarre combination of incidents seen during a game in Donaldson Park for many’s a year. Three Coleraine players were yellow carded for technical offences in as many minutes and eventually, after 48 minutes, the Dee pressure proved too much and Mark Cooper went over in the right hand corner. The scorer narrowly missed the conversion but the Deewere back in the game at 5-10. With the visitors down to twelve players one would have expected Donaghadee to dominate during the next ten minutes but Coleraine adjusted their tactics cleverly to deny the home side ball and the scoreboard remained unchanged until the three miscreants returned to the field of play. With 62 minutes played the visitors were adjudged offside at a ruck and Cooper stepped up to land the three points and draw the two sides closer at 8-10. Three minutes later minutes Stockton drove hard into the Coleraine pack but as the ball was recycled fell victim to swinging arm / punch from the visiting hooker. The referee had spotted the offence and immediately red carded the offender and with Cooper once again opting for the posts he kicked successfully to push the Dee into the narrowest of leads at 11-10. For the next ten minutes both sides had opportunities to win the game but defence remained to the fore with Montgomery, Barnes, Hamilton and Robbie Ingham particularly prominent in that regard for Donaghadee. On 76 minutes successive drives from the Dee led, on a number of occasions, by Montgomery & Dobson took them to thirty metres out where Coleraine were adjudged to be “holding on” in a ruck and Cooper stepped up to kick his third penalty in a row and leave his side with a 14-10 lead going into the final few minutes of the game. Donaghadee now fell to a succession of penalties but the dogged Coleraine side were unable to profit. With three minutes of injury time played the referee blew his whistle for no side and Donaghadee had their third league win in a row lifting themselves above their opponents in the league table by one point.

In what was an attritional and sometimes abrasive game a number of players stood out such as Cooper (who scored all the home side’s points), Dobson, Chesney & Barnes as well as the normal stand-out performances by Stockton, Hamilton and the brothers Ingham but head and shoulders above them all was Max Montgomery whose pedigree was always to the fore in terms of both his carrying and offensive defence which wins him this week’s Man of the Match. The Dee look forward to visiting Lisburn next Saturday in the third in a block of four key league games over the festive period. Whilst the Dee coaching team will be happy with the current form of the side they will undoubtedly be keen to address the persistent lineout issue which has been the one facet of their play which has been a significant area of concern over the last few weeks.