Melrose 19 - 13 Stirling County: Late flourish hands victory to ‘Rose

STIRLING County came within eight minutes of denting Melrose’s title ambitions before coach Graeme Young’s side had to leave with a solitary bonus point, but still with hopes of a British and Irish Cup place.

Melrose showed the true grit of champions when Grant Runciman and Allan Dodds scored with minutes left to keep their side clear of the field and atone for the defeat at Bridgehaugh.

“It did not look as if Stirling had enough points on the board at half-time [8-5 lead],” said Young. “We will take heart from our performance and a British and Irish Cup place is still realistic. And we have to be positive to take a point at Melrose.”

Try-scorer Dodds admitted that his side had to work hard for the victory. “It was a very tough game and we had to keep digging away. It wasn’t always pretty at times, but we settled down at the end,” he said.

“I was always alert [for the final score] and was told ‘to go for it’ and I managed to get my body in the way to score. We never gave up and the heads never went down and we thought that we would score if we kept getting phases of the ball.”

But it was too predictable to talk about retaining the title. “It’s one game at a time,” said Dodds

Even at 5-8 it looked promising for Melrose at the interval, after Steven Swindall and Fraser Thomson had scored first half tries. When Danny Gilmour scored for County with 20 minutes, Melrose had it all to do before Runciman and then Dodds, aided by two Andrew Skeen conversions, saw Melrose home – but only just.