SIMON SMITH: Team spirit shows despite narrow loss

It isn’t sour grapes, but sometimes you get decisions and sometimes you don’t.

We got a telling late decision in our win against Old Rishworthians, when maybe we didn’t on Saturday against Heath.

On the day though, we had our opportunities at 19-17 to go on and win it, but we were not quite clinical enough against what was a good Heath side with a solid defence.

Considering we lost Phil Stewart in the warm-up to an injury, we still made a good fist of it because changes had to be made at the last minute, which really affects your preparation.

Having to play one of the division’s strongest sides without using our go-to formation wasn’t easy, so to dig in like we did was impressive.

We also went into the game without Harry Domett, Matty Young, Phil Watson, Ali Sutton and Tom Harrison, while Euan Govier was rested because he had played a lot of rugby recently.

At the start of the season all of those names would have been regulars on our team-sheet.

Looking at the positives though, the spirit of the team and the club is showing through at the moment.

After the game it took a while for the team to come to terms with the defeat, hence guys were not keen to leave the changing room in a hurry.

I was pleased to hear positive comments from the supporters though, because all they want from their team is 100% effort.

The thing is that we must be doing something right at the moment because we had 30-plus guys at training on Thursday of last week and 23 to 26 on the Tuesday.

For me it is fantastic that we are getting everyone down from first-teamers to Danesmen.

We had a first-team Mr and Mrs evening at Tricolos on Saturday, so I’d like to say a massive thank you to them for hosting us.

Also we’ve recently had a beer-pong competition including the three mens’ teams and the Valkyries, which again shows the spirit we have.

Going back to the first team, it is now all about how we respond to losing our unbeaten home record when we play Hullensians on Saturday.

They will look at the result and think that they’ll want a bit of that, but the measure of a season is how you bounce back from these disappointing results.