Concordia 28, UdeM 5: A Tale of Two Halves for Stingers Men’s Rugby

Men’s Rugby Team Moves to 5-0 With Impressive Win

SportsMaxime Cadotte — Published October 21, 2019

The Stingers took advantage of scoring first in both halves to control the pace of the game.

For team captain Jackson Marquardt, scoring those two tries was important, but the finish is what matters most.

“It’s always great to start strong but it’s all about how you finish and I think we finished a pretty good game in both the first and second half,” said Marquardt.

The Stingers started off with a 14-5 lead at the break but discipline and turnovers were the big topic of the first half.

Forward coach John Lavery praised the team for keeping calm and staying focused on the task at hand.

“We talked about the École de Technologie Supérieure game and we highlighted the fact that we responded to a lot of provocation that we shouldn’t have, and I think the guys did some talking amongst themselves. We just need to focus on our game and credit to the boys who did that,” said Lavery.

The referee spoke to both captains multiple times during the first half about the discipline problem and wanted both teams to stick to the game.

“We just need to get back to playing rugby, it’s when we get to the off-field stuff that really starts to hinder us so if we just focus and keep playing rugby and we keep playing our game it’s never really a problem.” said Marquardt.

The second half, however, was all Concordia. The team scored 14 unanswered points to run away with the game. Front row man Michael Laplaine-Pereira gave the Stingers great field position on two separate occasions after running for 20+ yards into Montréal territory twice.

“It was good to get a few runs, you don’t get a lot of runs as a front row. I made some mistakes that I am gonna fix for the next few runs. Those runs helped us to get things started.” said Laplaine-Pereira.

The team now heads back home to face the Bishop University Gaiters in their final regular season game of the year, in hopes of finishing the regular season undefeated.

However, for Marquardt, this game is no different than the first game of the season.

“A new week is just a new game. Every week we start off 0-0 so we try and win the week, go out there and practice and win the practice and then it’s gonna be a process towards winning the game.” said the captain.

Lavery also echoes the same sentiment but is also concentrated on nationals as well.

“We only concentrate on us. We have some things we know we need to get better at. We know that the national level of competition is going to be higher in some areas of the game and we need to be preparing for that,” said Lavery.