Club Men: Cooke 20 Grosvenor 39 (McCrea Cup SF)

—

by

John McMurtry

We are currently carrying out a necessary behind-the-scenes upgrade to how images are stored and delivered on The Front Row Union Sports. With over 770,000 images on the site, we are moving our entire image library to a dedicated cloud storage service. This means images will load faster for you, regardless of where you are in the world, and the site will be more reliable overall.

As we are working on three separate versions of images during the offload process, the site cache sometimes struggles to keep up with which version to display and occasionally post grid images or complete galleries may fail to appear. This is a temporary side effect of the migration process — the image exists and is safe, it is simply in the process of being moved to its new home and identified as being there. A refresh of the page will usually bring them back, however, if it does not please contact john@thefrontrowunion.com stating clearly the post address and we will restore it as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this causes and appreciate your patience.

We expect the bulk of the image migration to be completed by the end of June 2026, with a fully upgraded version of the site ready to launch in August 2026. Once that work is done, the site will be noticeably faster, images will load more reliably, and you will not see any further disruption of this kind. Thank you for your continued support of The Front Row Union Sports.

Grosvenor progressed to the final of the McCrea Cup after a 20 – 39 win in the semi final against Cooke RFC at Shawsbridge on Saturday afternoon. They will now meet Queen’s University Belfast RFC 2nd XV in the final at Ravenhill on Easter Monday, 22nd April.

I was expecting this one to be played in rain and sleet but it ended up quite a pleasant afternoon, if a little chilly.  Both sides took advantage of the good conditions and certainly it was a more expansive and entertaining game than the first semi final on Friday night.

Grosvenor started the scoreboard clicking over with an early score from who crossed out wide on the left for an unconverted try. Cooke, with the wind at their back landed a long range penalty, by just eight minutes later.

A Cooke player was yellow carded for a touch of over enthusiasm during the tackle release and  crossed for Grosvenor shortly after. However, replied for Cooke while they were still a man down, a sniping run seeing him sneak through the defence. Both tries were unconverted leaving the score at 8 – 10 in Grosvenor’s favour.

Grosvenor responded almost immediately with crashing over for a try, converted by and, as their scrum began to dominate, the visitors grabbed their fourth score on the stroke of half time with finding the line. No conversion on this one, leaving the score at half time 8 – 22 in Grosvenor’s favour.

An outstanding try from , at the start of the second half, pushed the game firmly in Grosvenor’s favour and saw him pick up our nomination for the Samurai Star Player after a powerful run that started well in his own half. The conversion extended Grosvenor’s lead to 8 – 29.

Despite their scrum getting well and truly chewed up by this stage, Cooke hit back with a ty of their own from fullback who converted his own score.

Any thoughts of a come back were quickly quashed as that man Kelly was on hand to finish off a powerful run from Davidson taking the score to 15 – 34 as the game went into the final quarter.

Cooke refused to lie down and they were next on the scoreboard with Josh Harper crossing for an unconverted try but it was Grosvenor’s pack that were to have the final word with their powerful scrum taking one against the head for to power over for the final score of the game.

Final score: Cooke 20 Grosvenor 39. 

GALLEY BELOW

IF in Doubt, sit them out

Download the UK Concussion Guidelines for Grassroots Sport Here

Corrections

Drop us a note below if there are any corrections required in this article.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Rugby Latest