Their body language told me that we’d win,’ he said.
‘From the start we controlled the game.
We have powerful forwards, and the changes we made in the threes worked.
I felt straight from the kick-off that we’d do well.’Our benchmark in this league is very different to theirs.
I do believe we can climb towards the top of the table.’With only three points from four games played Jersey are currently in sixth place, five places and five points below the leaders, Guildford.However, this was a game which saw some of last season’s swagger return.
Jersey aren’t a bad team and that was clear six minutes from the start when, playing on a pitch which slopes, at times, alarmingly, they went ahead.Asserting themselves in the forwards, and playing the first half with the sideways slope to their left, they went ahead when they won a good ball from a lineout on the halfway-line and Jon Swift, now playing at centre, made an outside break before putting in an inside pass for John Allo to score under the posts.
Swift then converted to make it 7-0, a lead which was reduced within five minutes when the Alton left wing broke clear from messy broken play in his own 22 to outstrip the Jersey cover over 70 metres for a brilliant solo try wide out on the left.
The conversion was missed.Despite the closeness of the score, at 7-5, Burton was still confident his Jersey side would win.In the set scrums Jersey were all-powerful, with Jon Brennan and Marcus Nobes putting all sorts of pressure in the front row on their opposite numbers.Then, just before the break, Jersey made use of the line-out five metres from the Alton line to catch and drive, allowing Brennan to touch down wide out.
The conversion attempt went wide but it was 12-5 with 40 minutes remaining.Perhaps, in that first half, Jersey should have used the sloping pitch more effectively, but Alton were kept pegged in their own half in the second half with some excellent kicks by outside-half Phil Walker and Swift, at centre.And Steve O’Brien, now playing at outside centre, began to exploit the extra space he had been given to such an extent that the only way they could bring him down, in the 45th minute, was to take his head .
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.Swift said ‘thank you’ for the penalty and made it 15-5 with the resultant kick.After that, the Jersey pack, uncompromising in all they did on Saturday afternoon, stormed forward and, five minutes later, from another text-book line-out catch and drive, Marcus Nobes was forced over for an unconverted try to put Jersey 20-5 ahead.That was the end of either team scoring on a day when Jersey came good.
Burton’s decision to make changes in the threes paid dividends, and as he said afterwards: ‘Jon Swift made three breaks and although we scored from only one of them, we could have scored all three.
Despite losing so many games early on this season I’ve not been panicking.
We can play even better than this.
I’m looking forward to the game against Old Wimbledonians.’That game, when Jersey play away from home against the second-placed club in their London South-West League, Division III, will be in two weeks’ time.
If Jersey can sustain the momentum, their results can only get better.Squad: J Brennan, B Le Brocq, M Nobes, R Quirk, D McAlister, I Henderson, J Allo, A Allan, A Helmholt-Kneisel, P Walker, J Milner, J Swift, S O’Brien, C Butler, M White, K Moore, R Allan, D Toudic.
