Win against Banff shows future is bright for Ross Sutherland
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Ross Sutherland coach David Gill could see plenty of positives for his side in their 28–14 victory over Banff in Invergordon last weekend.
Two tries from Ali Kennedy, as well as scores from Aonghas MacIver and John Mann with four conversions from Dan Corr helped the Stags to a comfortable win, despite seeing two players sin binned in the extremely blustery conditions.
In fact, with plenty of other games around Scotland being called off with the weather, the first positive for Gill was simply that the match went ahead.
“Firstly we were delighted to get it played,” Gill explained.
“Having spoken to the Banff coaches after the game they reckoned themselves that if it had been a standard 3pm kick off, they wouldn’t have managed to get out of Banff.
“The fact that it was early, which was a previous arrangement, meant that we got it played. Conditions were still pretty poor, but fair play to both teams – they both made it a pretty good spectacle of rugby.
“Credit to the folk who came down to watch as well, because there were a good amount on the sidelines given that it was such a poor day, which was a bonus as well.”
On the pitch, the real highlight as far as Gill was concerned was the performance of Ross Sutherland’s younger players, who did enough to convince Gill the future will be bright at the Naval Grounds.
“We had a couple of young lads who hadn’t played the last few games and it was really good to see them come back into action,” he said.
“They’re the kind of guys we’re hoping to build the team around in the future, so it was great to see them back playing and see their confidence building.
“You could see them growing over the course of the 80 minutes.
“Hopefully we’ll get some more game time for them towards the end of the season, because these are the guys we want to build round for the next 10 or 15 years, so we’ve got to be trying to keep these guys involved.”
