This was very much a curate’s egg of a performance by Trinity, and that of a curate readily at ease amongst the dark, satanic mills.

They made a flying start, with a trio of scores in the first quarter of the match. The venerable Stanton finished in the corner with a neat side step (sweetly converted by Telfer) in the tenth minute, and the pace was maintained. Mark McEvilly crashed over to start an exciting burst of action, where Trinity butchered another within a minute – apparently flopping on the ball as it trickled over the try line was not possible. Little harm was done, as Kingston dropped out from under their own posts, and Mark Macaskill ran it straight back for a score. Rest assured, the kick out was not a long one, with the wind against Kingston offsetting any benefits of the slope. Telfer made it 21-0. The points stopped until the last touch of the first half, when Farooq Agbalaya snaffled the bonus point try, which was also converted. A near miss had come when Dan Crouch almost wriggled from the embrace of the last tackler, only for his pass to Farooq was deemed to have gone forward, but there were warning signs for Trinity about how the match play could go wrong. The fielding of Kingston restarts had been poor, the lineout inconsistent and the ball handling in attacking play had let them down a few times, preventing what could have been a horribly one-sided first half from the home team’s perspective.

The Kingston pep talk in the break obviously did the trick, and they knuckled down to the job much better from the whistle, scoring within a couple of minutes of the restart. On fifty minutes, McEvilly landed his second score, with a swan dive that had all the grace and elegance of said majestic water fowl when it is tied to a sack of cannonballs. The 35-7 margin was too comfortable, as the Trinity theme for the rest of the game was dropped passes, missed tackles and penalties conceded – fortunately Kingston had a lineout horror show, and any kick for touch was effectively handing back possession to Trinity. A succession of injury-forced adjustments did not help the continuity, with Spedding, Scott, Farooq and Wilson all departing the pitch, and when there were some attempts at sparkling attacking play, they never quite went to plan, with only the scrummage coming out of the game honour entirely intact. Kingston’s attempt to control possession meant that they only scored one more try, but there were a couple of moments when sloppy defence forced a Trinity player to make a timely decisive tackle right on their own line. The final verdict was job done, with a bonus point win and climbing out of the relegation zone, but the game gave nobody any reason for thoughts about resting on laurels.

Venn Diagram of the week:

MATCH REPORT: Simon McInnes
TRIBE ADVISORY PLAYER OF THE MATCH: Farooq Agbalaya