Hawcoat Park fell to a 44-19 defeat against an impressive Egremont in Cumbria Division One last Saturday, with the home side playing at a tempo that proved hard to live with.

Due to the two teams playing in differing leagues for many seasons, this was the first time in a while the Maroon and Whites made the journey up the coast and and it was a surface that certainly suited the Egremont style of play.

From the first scrum it was clear this was going to be an area Hawcoat were going to dominate throughout the game, but it turned out to be the only area.

Egremont therefore avoided the set-pieces wherever they could and had a strategy of running the ball at every opportunity and had the mobility and pace to cause real problems.

Egremont opened the scoring with a 30-metre penalty, but the visitors scored the first try when from a Callum Ramsay clean line-out take and dominant forward drive, Grady Slater got his hands on the ball to touch down.

Winger Jack Lord, in particular, was defending manfully for Park and pulled off one great cover tackle to prevent a try. However from good handling moves their full back and centre had the pace to beat our defensive cover to score wide out on the right for two unconverted tries.

Just before half time, Hawcoat were able to get back in the game, as Slater first went close from another impressive scrum, then looked to be pushing over from the reset before Egremont prevented the score illegally for the referee to award a penalty try.

With only one point separating the teams at the start of the second half, Egremont stretched their lead with a 30-metre penalty.

Park then went ahead after good work by Harry Higgins, who then had to go off with a shoulder injury, put them on the front foot before scrum-half Lewis Sayle timed a great pass to put impressive fly-half Elliott McDermott through a gap to score under the posts from 40 metres out and George Smith converted.

It was all downhill from there as Egremont turned on the style. Brad Morrow had to leave the field with a wrist injury, followed soon after by Slater with a recurrence of an ankle injury to be replaced by his dad Steve, much to the displeasure of watching wife/ mum Tara!

Wingers Rodney Odondi and Lord were working overtime in defence but Egremont scored four further converted tries, all through good handling and support moves at pace and enjoyed by the large home crowd.

Two were individual efforts by the outstanding twinkle-toed fly-half, who was at the heartbeat of all that was good from the hosts.