West Country club snatch 31-27 win with 79th-minute try after trailing by 17

A West Country club trailed 27-10 at half-time on Saturday and had, by their own director of rugby’s account, been “taken apart in every phase of the game”. Forty minutes and four unanswered tries later they had won 31-27, the final score coming from a driving maul in the 79th minute that the visiting London side could see coming from 30 metres away and still could not stop.

Jonty Blackmore, the 24-year-old replacement hooker who scored it, had come on at half-time with instructions, he said, to “hit everything that moved and then hit the maul”. He did both. The home pack, which had been shoved off its own ball twice in the first half, won six scrum penalties after the break and drove three lineouts over the line.

The London club had been superb before the interval. Their fly-half, the Argentine international Mateo Villalba, kicked beautifully for territory and their back three ran in four tries in 22 minutes, two of them from turnovers. At 27-10 the home crowd of 14,200 had gone quiet. The director of rugby, Phil Treharne, said he had “not shouted at half-time, because there was no point. I showed them the lineout stats and told them that was the game.”

The comeback began with a try from the wing on 49 minutes, then a penalty try from a collapsed maul on 58 that also saw the visitors’ tighthead sent to the sin-bin. The third try, on 67, was the home side’s only moment of invention, a cross-kick from their 20-year-old fly-half, Ollie Redmayne, that the full-back caught and scored from without breaking stride. That made it 27-24, and the last 12 minutes were played almost entirely in the visitors’ 22.

“We knew the maul was coming and we could not hold it,” said the London side’s head coach, Jérôme Lacoste. “That is not a tactical failure. That is a physical one. They were better than us in the second half in the areas you cannot coach your way out of on a Saturday afternoon.”

The result lifts the home side to fourth in the Premiership after five rounds and drops the Londoners to sixth. It was the biggest half-time deficit overturned in the league since 2019, and the home side’s first win against this opponent in four years.

Blackmore, who was released by a Welsh region two years ago and joined on a one-year deal, said he had “never scored a try that mattered before”. Treharne, who had spent the week insisting his side could not afford to lose, was asked whether this was the kind of win that changes a season. “It is the kind of win that stops you having to answer that question for a week,” he said.