Bournville Forwards Coach CJ Osazuwa was proud of the battling performance of the players in the 34-33 defeat at Bromsgrove.
It required a penalty from Bromsgrove centre Will Tanner with the very last kick of the match to deny Bourns a famous victory after they played the last 65 minutes with 14 men following the sending-off of flanker Adam Shaw for an alleged head butt.
Bourns made the short trip back across the Lickey Hills with two consolation bonus points rather than the maximum five that they were just seconds away from securing but knowing and knowing that they had almost fulfilled Osazuwa’s half-time prophesy.
“I am so proud of the boys. We talked at half-time and I told them: I can see a future where we win this match and it’s all from working very hard,” Osazuwa said.
“I can be over-technical with the boys at times but it wasn’t going to be about technique, it was going to be about running until you had nothing left.
“The boys were taking the mickey out of me when I said at half-time that I could see us winning by two points. But if we all bought in to working as hard as we could and we could keep the ball then we would be in the fight.
“In the second-half we were just brilliant, we played some good rugby and the first half took so much out of us so we didn’t have a huge amount left in the legs
“But we put on a performance, we scored some good tries and our set-piece scrum was just unbelievable.
“The over-riding thing is pride, the under-riding thing was our discipline let us down again.
“We don’t give away any nasty penalties. We are really good in the jackal, our set piece is good but we just try to force the game. We are a team that’s good enough not to have to force to scenarios.
If you look at all our games – the ones we have won and the ones we have lost – it just come down to penalty counts.”
Bournville will review footage of the match before deciding whether to contest Shaw’s sending-off when he appears before a North Midlands RFU disciplinary panel.
Although his early departure left Bournville without a key player for the majority of the match, Osazuwa backed the remaining 14 players, plus the three replacements, to adapt.
“If I’m brutally honest when Shawsy went off I wasn’t bothered. Call it naivete, call it what you want but I genuinely wasn’t bothered because we were playing so well and we were showing so much dominance,” Osazuwa said.
“One thing we show week on week is our physicality. The boys tackle in twos and we do lots of good things around both sides of the breakdown.
“So, when he got sent off – as much as I would rather him have stayed on – I still thought we could win the match.
“Bromsgrove then had a an amazing 20 minute period where they upped their physicality and they started hitting us in the wide channels. When that happened I would happily have taken the two points.”
