Harrower’s last-gasp drop goal breaks Midlands hearts in Premiership thriller

Finn Harrower had missed two kicks at goal, thrown an intercept pass and spent much of the third quarter being told by his captain, loudly and at close range, to calm down. So when the ball came back to him from a ruck 40 metres out with the clock showing 80:14 and his side a point behind, there was no particular reason to think the evening was about to turn into the one that defines his young career.

It did. The 23-year-old fly-half took one step back, struck the ball cleanly off his right boot and watched it carry through the uprights with room to spare, turning a 24-25 deficit into a 27-25 win for the west country club and silencing a Midlands crowd of 15,800 that had been singing for the previous five minutes. “I didn’t hear anything,” Harrower said. “Honestly, I just thought, well, I can’t make the night any worse.”

The visitors had led 17-6 at half-time after a dominant 40 minutes in which their pack, marshalled by the veteran hooker Jack Mellor, won three scrum penalties and the second-row Tendai Rowe scored from a lineout drive. But the hosts emerged transformed after the break, scoring three tries in 19 minutes through their centre pairing and taking a 25-17 lead when their replacement scrum-half dived over in the corner on 64 minutes.

Harrower’s side regrouped. A penalty on 70 minutes brought them within five; a try from Rowe, his second, five minutes later levelled it at 24-24 before Harrower pushed the conversion wide. When the hosts kicked a penalty to lead by one with four minutes left, the game appeared settled.

“We talked at half-time about keeping our discipline and then we gave away 11 penalties in the second half,” said the visitors’ head coach, Dean Prosser. “That’s not a game plan, that’s a miracle. Finn will get the headlines and he deserves them, but Tendai Rowe carried 19 times and I don’t think anyone noticed.”

The home side’s director of rugby, Marcus Levitt, was blunt about his team’s failure to close the game out. “We had the ball with three minutes to go and we kicked it away,” he said. “If you give a fly-half of that quality the ball in the last minute you deserve what you get.” He said his side, who have now lost three of their first five matches, would “look very hard” at their game management this week.

The result moves the visitors to third in the table. Harrower, whose contract expires in the summer, said he had “not thought about” his future. His coach was less coy. “He’s going nowhere,” Prosser said. “I’ll chain him to the posts.”