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A LAST minute Alfie Lewis try ensured Dungannon salvaged a share of the Energia All-Ireland League 2A spoils at Cashel, who played for 78 minutes with just 14 men after Timothy Townsend’s early red card.
Despite that set-back after just two minutes, the home side started brightly, engineering a 5-0 lead through Rob Carney’s unconverted try. Dungannon responded just after the half hour when David Leyburn dotted down but a drop goal sent Cashel into the break with a narrow lead.
After the restart, more disciplinary discretion cost the hosts when Max Riley Fox was yellow-carded. Further numerical advantage was converted into points by Dungannon who took the lead through a Charlie Conroy score, converted by Ben McCaughey before they too fell foul of the referee when James McCammon was sin-binned.
Cashel bounced back at this stage with two tries, one from Marcel Strydom, while John O’Sullivan kicked two conversions and a penalty to lead 25-17 after McCaughey had kicked three points for Dungannon.
The visitors weren’t about to give up and with seven minutes remaining McCaughey added another penalty to his tally before, in the final minute, Lewis squirmed over to level matters with Dungannon’s third try of the game to make it 25-25, suffering an arm injury in the process.
While relieved and pleased to have seen his side salvage something from the game and continue their unbeaten start to life in 2A, Dungannon head coach, Jonny Gillespie, admits he was less than impressed by the overall performance produced by his team.
“We decided to not play well!,” he observed.
“Maybe we need to train against 14 a little bit more often to become accustomed to it because I felt we did a lot of things wrong, kicked poorly, made too many mistakes and let them back into it.
“We gave them momentum, easy access to us and they fed off that. But it feels like two points salvaged rather than two dropped because they are a proud team at home and more than one point down in Munster is a win, so we’re relieved but we’re not happy.
“We weren’t good for 25 minutes [of the second half], it was literally the last 10 minutes when we managed to get a bit of ball but I have to credit their ability to finish.
“It was a slow pitch, a sticky pitch and it could easily have been smashed into touch and we’d have lost the game, so I have to acknowledge that they did finish it well.”
