The Front Row Union Sport - Championship 1: Instonians 38 Cooke 20

Championship 1: Instonians 38 Cooke 20

Nov 30, 2021

—

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.

Davie Hayes caught up with the most local of derbies as Instonians entertained Cooke at, their shared facilities, Shaws Bridge in an Ulster Championship Division 1 match.

Instonians have been ripping up a storm in the Championship this season with 8 wins from 8 games in the championship and a 97% match point pick up, only failing to secure a try bonus in one game.

However, Cooke were on a run of two wins and a draw in their last three and after a with a big win at Portadown last weekend they would have gone into this game with some confidence.

In a few of the Instonians matches we’ve covered this season they have had a slow enough start and pulled away in the second half and so it proved in this game. The “home” side did get on the scoreboard fairly quickly though with winger Zac Davidson getting the opening score after 4 minutes.

Instonians Zac Davidson opens the scoring after being put through by **Ali Bourke**

Cooke responded through Toby McManus at the end of the first quarter to take the score to 5 – 5 and the tit for tat continued with Instonians pack mauling over for Neill Saulters to touch down and Matthew Keane to convert before Cooke replied through a Dan White try, converted by Andy Hanna, to level the score at 12 – 12 midway through the second quarter.

Instonians inched ahead at the break thanks to a Paul Pritchard try, converted by Keane, off another maul before Hanna landed a penalty to bring the half to a close with Instonians leading 19 – 15.

Instonians picked up their bonus point try at the start of the second half of yet another maul with Saulters getting his second try, this one converted by Keane before Keane made it try No 5 with a solo effort which he also converted to push the score along to 33 – 15.

Cooke’s Stewart Elwood gets the final score against Instonians in Championship 1 at Shaws Bridge

Cooke lost winger Andy Nelson to a yellow card in the final ten minutes and Instonians Michael Melville took advantage of the space to score out wide before Cooke rallied for the final score of the game through Stuart Elwood to give a final score of Instonians 48 Cooke 20.