The Cowichan Piggies played what head coach Gord McGeachy called “probably our best game of the year so far,” last Saturday as they defeated the Nanaimo Hornets 25-13 at home.
“We’ve been working pretty hard the last few weeks on our fitness,” McGeachy said. “We’ve been working hard at practice and we’ve hit a good level of fitness, and that’s starting to show through in our game.”
The Piggies were also ready to play their own game, rather than responding to what their opponents did.
“Probably moreso than any other game this year, we were prepared for what we were going to focus on ourselves and not what Nanaimo was going to do,” McGeachy said
Cowichan started well and had Nanaimo under pressure, but suddenly ended up trapped in their own end and the Hornets got on the board first. Five minutes later, Dan James scored Cowichan’s first unconverted try, and five minutes after that, Andrew Gudmundseth kicked a penalty goal to give the Piggies an 8-5 lead.
A minute before the first half expired, Robbie McDonnell went over the line to give Cowichan a 13-5 edge at halftime.
The Piggies had been playing against the wind in the first half, so they tried to play a possession game, which worked out even better than they expected.
“We were hoping to keep it close, so to come out of that with an eight-point lead was pretty pleasing,” McGeachy said. “We tried to do a little more kicking in the second half; we tried to open up the game a little more.”
Ten minutes into the second half, Jenner Teufel scored to give the Piggies an 18-5 lead. The Hornets answered back 10 minutes after that, but Gudmundseth went on a solo run to score and converted his own try to close out the scoring.
Peter Budina appeared to score a final try for Cowichan with 10 minutes left in the match, but the linesman made the unusual judgment that he knocked the ball on while setting it down, and called it back. The Hornets used that call as inspiration to battle down the stretch, but the Piggies weathered the storm and held on to their 12-point advantage.
Cowichan did score four points to get the bonus point in the standings, which pushed the team into first place in the Times Cup North Division with league games left.
The Piggies will play an exhibition game against Comox this Saturday at 1 p.m.
