The Front Row Union Sport - Irish Schools: Ballyclare High 21 St Gerards, Bray 36

Irish Schools: Ballyclare High 21 St Gerards, Bray 36

Jan 3, 2020

—

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.

St Gerard’s travelled from County Wicklow this morning to play Ballyclare High School in a schools’ friendly at Rashee Road.

Report and pictures by Bob Given Photography

Despite travelling over 140 miles for the game St Gerard’s hit the ground running scoring 5 tries, 2 converted, in a dominant first half display.

St Gerard’s, Bray, dominated most aspects of the first half.

Ballyclare only made occasional forays into the St Gerard’s half.

Maybe it was what the Ballyclare coach said at half time or the substitutions but it was a different team after the break.

For the first 15 minutes of the second half Ballyclare had all the territory and possession, finally crossing the St Gerard’s line with a try by Mark Jackson, which he converted himself.

Mark Jackson heads for the line for Ballyclare’s opening score.

Ballyclare continued to press and were rewarded after 20 minutes when Scott Martin crossed under the posts, after an interception. Jackson added the points.

In a rare trip into the Ballyclare half, St Gerard’s scored a converted try close to the posts.

Ballyclare had the final say when in the last move of the game Conor Dargan scored wide out and Jackson added the points.

Ballyclare will wonder what the result might have been if they had shown the commitment and resolve that they showed in the second half in the first!