The Island club were 33-0 behind at Vallis Way on Saturday afternoon before a six-try Championship comeback, with the Kiwi winger being pivotal with some excellent running from deep and link play with scrum-half Will Homer and fullback Auguy Slowik.
However, their efforts were still not enough as Jersey shipped 52 points before the final whistle – the highest against Ealing in the second-tier, toppling the 45-14 defeat suffered to the Londoners at home in April.
Van Dam said: ‘The first half was real bad for us, we just couldn’t string anything together, giving away penalties left, right and centre and even when we had the ball we were dropping it. So we went into the sheds at half time, didn’t get a telling off, it was more like play for each other as we are so far down at that moment, work for each other and see what happens. We came out and started doing that and it made so much difference so it was real fun in the end.
‘It definitely gave us the free will to play that you wouldn’t have in a close game, and the set-piece wasn’t going good so we were just quick tapping everything and doing quick line-outs which seemed to work so it shows if we can play that brand of rugby which is quite exciting and take it into other games it should pay-off.
‘We’ll definitely take the try bonus-point, at half-time we were a bit down in the dumps but it’s good for us to come away with that and we need to learn to do that from minute one, not minute 40.
‘We’re building momentum, and this game shows how we can switch off and it can hurt us but we need to be better disciplined. In other games we’ve had a few yellow cards – we didn’t have one today but our starts and consistency is what we need to really work on.’
Full report and reaction in Monday’s JEP.
