Last-minute magic

Rookie’s late try saves Gaels from defeat

The women's rugby team were minutes away from a loss to the Brock Badgers on Saturday.
Image by: Justin Chin
The women's rugby team were minutes away from a loss to the Brock Badgers on Saturday.

Though the Brock Badgers dominated for almost 80 minutes in Saturday’s game at West Campus, the women’s rugby team squeaked out with a 15-14 victory to improve to 2-0 on the season.

Trailing 14-8 with only a few minutes remaining, rookie winger Lauren McEwen broke through the Brock defence with a 70-metre run to score a try and bring the Gaels within one point of the Badgers. Lock Bronwyn Corrigan scored a conversion to put the Gaels ahead.

Captain Rachelle Kranenburg said she wasn’t satisfied with the win.

“Brock came out really hard and we were sloppy for a lot of the game,” Kranenburg said. “We need to learn from it.”

Fly-half Andrea Wadsworth scored to give the Gaels a 5-3 lead at half time but the Badgers improved after the break. The play was consistently in the Gaels’ end, forcing the team to continuously defend instead of establishing their offensive game.

Kranenburg said her team must improve their play if they want success.

“It’s good that this happened early in the season because it’s a really terrible feeling,” she said. “We don’t want that to happen ever again.”

Head coach Beth Barz said she was surprised by the team’s subpar play.

“We looked pretty good in our warm up and run through,” Barz said. “We’ve just got to find a few answers for why we played on the back foot the whole game.”

The Gaels travel to Toronto on Friday to play the 0-2 York Lions at 7 p.m.

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