The Front Row Union Sport - Schools Cup: Ballymena Academy 14 Royal Belfast Academical Institution 21 Final

Schools Cup: Ballymena Academy 14 Royal Belfast Academical Institution 21 Final

Mar 19, 2024

—

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.

On Monday afternoon, Ballymena Academy faced Royal Belfast Academical Institution in the Schools Cup Final at the Kingspan Stadium. A very large vocal crowd greeted the players, as they ran out for kick off.

Playing into a stiff diagonal breeze, Ballymena were first to show in attack. As Ballymena moved the ball wide James Kerr read the pass, intercepted, and showed a clean pair of heels to the Ballymena defence, as he sprinted over 80 metres to score under the posts. Alex Place’s conversion had Inst up 7-0 in 5 minutes.

Daniel Vercoe-Rogers dives over, for Ballymena’s opening score

Ballymena were patient, going through phases. From a short penalty, Daniel Vercoe-Rogers picked a perfect line, evading Inst tackles to dive over, under the posts. Robbie Coleman’s conversion tied the . . .

FRU Sports is funded by subscriptions. To read the rest of all our articles and view all our images you will need to Register and Login using the links at the top of this page.

Your support directly affects the number of matches we can cover.