Action from the Senior Shield on Saturday 6 September 2025. Photo: Cyril Boyd. © FRU SPORTS 2025.

Senior Shield: Ballyclare 47 Belfast Harlequins 14

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Ballyclare hosted Harlequins in a Senior Shield group match in front of a vociferous crowd on Saturday afternoon at The Cloughan.

Ballyclare were first on the scoreboard with Joel McBride bursting through the middle to score close to the posts making Matthew McDowell’s conversion straightforward.

A spectacular dive from joel McBride to open the scoring for Ballyclare.

Within seven minutes, the same pairing scored again, this time McBride touching down between the posts and McDowell adding the extras.

It didn’t take long for the home side to add another try, this time No 8 Jack Gamble ran through near the posts, McDowell again adding the extras.

To be fair, Harlequin heads didn’t drop and just before half time No 20, Jayden Shiels burst through to score with Johnny McLaughlin adding the conversion to take the score to 21 – 7 at half time.

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