Southern Lions were looking to improve from the match in round 3 against Perth Irish. Southern Lions were too strong for the home team in the first half. However, Perth Irish came back strongly in the second half with ill discipline from Lions players resulting in 3 Yellow Cards and 1 Red Card. A better side would have made Lions pay and players must improve their attitudes.

Southern Lions were winners outscoring Perth Irish by 6 tries to 2. The final score was 38-14.

Southern Lions co-coach Dan King provided the following summary of the game -

"We were pretty confident we would get the result today and we did but it wasn’t easy!

The Lads had a pretty decent week of training so we wanted to apply what we had ran through and put in practice today, some areas we improved and some we didn’t so it’s back to the training ground to iron out these. I thought our line-out was really good again and everyone was doing their job really well, both Irwin and Tim looked good in the air and gave us good ball which Trigger sent out to the backs. Our line-out drives worked and Aaron scored a lovely try off some patient mauling from our line-out it looked really good so big ups to the lads on the score. There was a some very strong running and two well worked tries by young Branden and even Tim went over the line for a strong score from 30 meters out. I was really pleased how we scrummaged as well but it’s not quite there as yet so we will work more at training as we should be killing teams in this area.

From what I saw of the backs I was pretty impressed, Nathan had a pretty strong game as always and kicked and distributed the ball well to unleash the backs, the wingers went well and got stuck in and the centres all were strong and did their job, there are improvements for all the squad that we will address at training and I expect a very busy week for the lads as we went off the boil in the last 10 minutes of the game conceding ground through penalty’s and lads off the park for receiving cards so this is a big work on for us going forward, we will learn from these areas and turn into positives going forward.

The Perth Irish team made it very difficult for us, they looked a different team in terms of players and had some big physical boys out there. They seemed better drilled and fitter around the park so it was good to see them improving and they really took it too us today and we needed a hard test. I will be expecting 200% commitment this week as we addressed after the game our standards dipped today and this is not acceptable."

Congratulations to the coaches and players on continuing the great start to the season.

Team Selection

1 Jason King
2 Aaron Baker
3 Rewi Haapu
4 Tim Coffey
5 Irwin Swinny
6 Branden Niemann
7 Peter Jackson
8 Dan King
9 Michael Clifton
10 Nathan Lamatoa
11 Blake Rigby
12 Haami Henry
13 Matt Riches
14 Kurt Delome
15 Konnor Day
16 Jared Lamatoa
17 Jayden Jacques
18 Junior Tairea
19 Sam Price
20 Dawid Van Sittert
21 Bruce Meyer
22 Murray Jackson
23 Dean Payne