Scots U18s get back on victory trail against Irish

SCOTLAND Under-18s produced an impressive display as they got back to winning ways against Ireland Clubs Under-18s on 
Sunday following defeat by England’s Premiership-sourced side a week earlier.

The young Scots will now train at Murrayfield this weekend before flying out to Grenoble a week tomorrow ahead of their meeting with Wales in the opening round of the FIRA-AER tournament on Friday week.

The quality of the forward play was particularly uplifting as they thrashed the Irish 25-0. “We produced some real go-forward play and that put Ireland under pressure. We got results from that,” said Scotland Under-18 head coach Eddie Pollock.

Ireland Clubs had arrived in Hamilton confident after a good performance against Italy. “We’re very disappointed having had a good match against Italy Under-18s a fortnight ago,” said their coach, Wayne Mitchell. “We also had a camp last weekend and we thought we had made genuine progress but the first half just killed us. We missed a lot of tackles by not going low enough.”

Scotland scored three tries in the rout, one from George Watson’s College player Neil Irvine-Hess and two of them by the rapidly-improving lock, Lewis Carmichael, who was one of five North Berwick players in the squad. The other points came from the boot of Ayr full-back Gavin Lowe, the man of the match.

Elsewhere, George Watson’s overcame the absence of their international players to record a 36-3 win against Kelvinside Academy and complete an unbeaten season. This is the fourth time Watson’s have gone through a season undefeated, the previous such successes having been in 1920/21, 1970/71 and 1988/89.

Meanwhile, Stewart’s-Melville College were 13-10 winners over Dundee High School at Inverleith on Saturday, the difference being a penalty goal from stand-off Scott Docherty.

At Goldenacre last week Heriot’s posted another good result with 42-12 win over St Aloysius College, with Finn 
Murphy and Archie Cable scoring two tries each and the others coming from Robert Black, Josh Sweetnam and Ben Jones.

In the Brewin Dolphin competitions still to be completed, Peebles High School booked their place in the final of the under-18 Bowl with a 36-7 win over Williamwood High School, from a six-try performance that included a hat-trick from their Borders representative centre Scott Halliday. Peebles are joined by three other Borders finalists, Galashiels Academy (U18 Plate), Jedburgh Grammar School (U16 Plate) and Selkirk High School (U16 Bowl).