Quins and Old Paulines both started the season with chastening losses to early league pacesetters. Saturday therefore provided a chance for either to reset the balance; to go into an early-season break still within striking distance of the top of the league.

Over the years, Quins and OPs have had some fantastic encounters with every result from complete blow-outs to a hard-fought draw.
What has been clear over our last few meetings however is that OPs have lost some of their key players. That said, this early in the season it can always be something of a guessing game as to you’ll face – as Saturday proved.

Povey worked miracles to pull together a 20-man squad but it was a starting XV that had seven changes from the previous week including a whole new second row (both on debut) and bringing himself out of semi-retirement.

As a microcosm of the issues faced in level 10 rugby, it was a shining example.

And yet Saturday also showed the strength of Quins’ team spirit. There was Woody on the bench who hadn’t pulled on the boots in seven years. There was Wags playing his first game since 2022. Dean travelling straight to the game from the airport. Josh coming back from uni for the weekend just to play. Aaron doing overtime work all week so he could get Saturday off.

That we ultimately didn’t need to call in all of these favours is in stark contrast with OPs’ situation; our guests letting us know on Friday that they would be making the short trip from Thames Ditton with just 12 players.

OPs deserve full credit for going ahead with the fixture. It would have been easy to have given us the walkover (as happened elsewhere in the league) but in truth the match was over as a contest before a ball was kicked.

What followed therefore was in essence an extended live-fire training exercise. A chance for Mosese to pull on the Quarters for the first time, for Wags and Woody to fall back in love with rugby and for Povey to edge ever closer to his 100th cap.

A final score of 88-12 and 14 tries scored (you can see them all here) is never a bad day at the office but the most gratifying part was how perhaps ungratifying the win was.

At times, we were very guilty of white line fever and certainly our discipline standards dropped; particularly either side of half-time. At this level, the successful teams are usually those who get the basics of the game right as Haslemere showed last week and against sterner opposition, those slips will be more costly.

It’s also fair to say that defensive lapses played a huge part in OPs’ tries. For their first, we completely switched off allowing OPs to take a quick lineout in their own 22. We were also slow to react to a charged down kick with OPs’ centre scampering through to score.

So, what did we take from this game?

We’ve found a good’un in Mosese. His hattrick of tries all came from running hard at the defence.
Despite so many changes from last week, we had 20 players ready to go. As people come back from holidays and injury, that can only create squad depth and competition for places.
And don’t let Archie take a conversion.

Finally, a special thanks to Wags for coming back to the club after a long absence only to play 80 minutes for OPs. Yet another example of the amazing team spirit shown this weekend.