THEY would have been celebrating long and hard in Quirindi on Saturday night after the Lions found their roar again.
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And roar they did, hammering Scone 62-7.
It’s their first win since August 2013 and was the first in Lions colours for many of the players.
So much so that seven or eight of them didn’t know the victory song when they belted it out in the sheds afterwards, co-coach Nick Rees commented.
He hopes they get a bit more practice at it.
“We’ve turned a corner but we’ve still got work to do,” Rees said.
“We don’t want to finish on one win.”
Saturday was everything they’ve been working on and shown glimmers of coming together.
“Turnovers today for us were at a minimum,” Rees said.
“We didn’t turn over the ball at critical times either attacking in our 22 or coming out of our 22.”
The Lions knew the Brumbies viewed the game as a good chance to get a win and didn’t underestimate them at all.
With good reason early.
“Honestly, for the first part of the game Scone were very competitive and very hard,” Rees said.
“We tried to play our structured football and did and it allowed us to put two tries on.”
From that, they jumped out to a 22-nil lead at half-time.
“The forwards laid the platform and the backs finished it,” Rees said. “It was good traditional rugby.”
They had instigated a few backline changes and they worked well for them.
“We really sung out wide,” Rees said.
“We were just trying to capitalise on the talent we had.
“We had Jake Murray who’s a 12 but has been playing 10.
“Moving him to 12 and Tom Tanner to 10 we had two ball distributors.”
Tanner was one of four to make the double club, with hooker Toby Simkin, outside centre Jake Smith and fullback Ben Webber all finding the line twice.
Webber and Murray shared the one point behind prop James Davidson (two) and Tanner (three).
Number eight Jake Cameron was the players’ pick in what was his last game for them.
He’s one of several who have been there through the tough days and has been captain the past couple of seasons.
The Brumbies had headed to Quirindi with high hopes but were disappointing.
“We didn’t bring the same attitude as we did the previous week,” coach Luke Bailey said.
That was the crux of their problems.
“Our attitude in defence and attitude in attack is all I can blame it on,” he said.
“We’ve got no excuses and we’re not looking for any.”
He said outside centre Toby Twigg and number eight Doug McKillop tried hard all day but they didn’t have a lot of support.
