THE mud has barely dried on their 2015 campaign but New England are already in planning for next year’s Country Championships.
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The zone will host the 2016 instalment in Armidale.
It’ll be the first time in “a long while” the zone has hosted the championships.
“We’re looking forward to it,” president David Clifton said.
It was a successful weekend for the two local zones, with the Kookaburras Seniors claiming the Richardson Shield and the Lions Colts winning the NRMA Colts Shield with a 23-13 win over Illawarra.
With that, they will jump up to the Rowlands Colts Cup next year, where they will join the Kookaburra Colts.
The Kookas kept their place in the top tier with a 20-17 win over defending champions Central West.
It was a fantastic result given that only a few weeks ago there were fears that they would have to pull out, and were virtually thrown together.
“We’re absolutely thrilled with them,” co-coach Barry Everingham said.
Firstly against Central Coast in their semi-final, in which they went down 17-3.
“It was an outstanding effort in terrible conditions,” Everingham said.
It was very heavy underfoot and cloggy.
Even still, they “certainly had their opportunities”.
“They felt they had the better of the chances, they just couldn’t execute,” Everingham said.
Scores were level 0-all at half-time.
Central Coast opened the scoring with a penalty and then scored a runaway on a kick through to make it 10-nil.
The Kookaburras got back to 10-3 after about four kickable penalties, finally taking one, and had a lot of field position towards the end of the game but they couldn’t bridge the gap.
Then in the final seconds Central Coast got another runaway.
Against Central West they really had to dig deep.
“They were unbelievable,” Everingham said.
They had to play the better part of the last 10 minutes a man down and for four of those holding on to just a three-point lead.
“Everyone just kept turning up,” he said.
He said they played a lot smarter than they did on Saturday, keeping it a lot tighter.
Sam Knight was outstanding at number eight both days. Brayden Grehan, Billy Urquhart and Tom Apthorpe were also strong, with Apthorpe playing on both sides of the scrum.
Second-rowers Nick Lyons and Angus Smith had to play a lot of time and were also “very good”.
Jack Maunder was also strong in the Sunday game after being moved from the back row to inside centre.