Next week sees the North One East season reach its half way point and The Bees go into that fixture against Bridlington nicely placed in fourth in the league table, with another home fixture against Cleckheaton to come before the Christmas break. On a surface possibly better suited to growing rice, The Bees put away the silky skills for much of the game and battered away up the middle of the field for most of the first hour. This tactic seemed to grind down the home defence and the visitors were able to run in four tries between the 47th and 68th minutes to claim the bonus point victory. The pick of those scores was the final one where young flanker Will Broadbent somehow gathered a pass which had been flung in his general direction, rather than to him, from ankle height and zipped home from twenty five metres out with the Malton and Norton defence nowhere to be seen. Tom Cummins put in a man of the match shift at number eight bashing his way through the mud and a wall of defenders time and again to keep the Malton and Norton defence honest and the Bees going forward, either side of the furrow that Cummins ploughed right up the middle of the field, the other two Toms in the Bees back row, Messrs Booth and Bacon, also did their share of heavy lifting and Bacon's turn of speed across the slightly less damp areas of the field saw him galloping home for the Bees first score in the 17th minute. The home side had opened the scoring in the eighth minute through Nick Daley, with a deserved second score coming in the 28th minute which meant the home side turned round 12 - 5 up with Paul Angus converting Daley's try.

The home side seemed to basing their defence on standing up the Bees attacker to stop the ball going to ground and therefore preventing a quicker release of the ball from the ruck, and while this certainly slowed down the pace of the game, the tactic somewhat backfired as the referee awarded the home side a scrum as the maul became static, which allowed the Bees pack to shunt the home side off the ball or to win a penalty. Inevitably the Bees chose to scrummage again just to keep the home eight blowing and as the second half wore on the gaps started to appear in the home defence. This allowed the Bees to think outside the bash up the middle and Stefan Roguski was soon over the line from short yardage, leaving Lance Taylor a relatively straight forward conversion. With the ball now beginning to be shifted out wide it was perhaps inevitable that Jack Malthouse would find himself on the end of a move to claim his tenth try in as many appearances, followed almost immediately by a score from Tom Johnson, who may have been slowed by the conditions initially but was starting to create space as the game wore on and the home side tired. It was a Taylor and Johnson break up the right wing which tee'd up Will Broadbent's score in the 68th minute but as the weather looked to be closing in and the gloom descended further, it seemed that the referee had seen enough and the game ended in the seventy fifth minute .

By
Nick Patterson