West Craven Warriors 6 - Heysham Atoms 36

After a week off and on a very uneven pitch, Heysham Atoms were the first on the scoreboard against West Craven, who are top of Division 6 in the Pennine league, with an Andy Garnet penalty.

West Craven struck back quickly when their very large prop powered onto the ball from 5 yards out to score under the sticks. Heysham didn't panic and stuck to the job in hand with Lewis Mills always causing the Craven defence trouble.

With good powerful drives by Lee Harvey and Gav Halliwell, this set the platform for Keith Hartlebury to send out a short pass to Chris Helme who with his good turn of speed left the craven defence grasping at thin air.

The try was scored in the corner and the angle was just a bit too much for Garnett who brushed the side of the posts with his conversion attempt.

From the restart the Atoms never looked in trouble and played a sensible game. Eventually the pressure told and this time it was Mills who was on the scoresheet. Garnett was successful with this kick and put the Atoms 12-6 up, and this is how it stayed until half time.

The second half was totally dominated by the Atoms with 5 unanswered tries with Mills scoring his second, Dave McVernon two, Bryan Cambidge one, and Garnett scoring his 24th of the season. Cambidge was also unsuccessful with a conversion.

It was a good opportunity for coach David Crow to have a look at a couple of younger players with Jo Pyrah and Colin Bebbington both playing a good part and not looking out of their depth.

This was a potential banana skin, but the Atoms proved to themselves that they can play to a good game plan and came out convincing winners 36-6.

It proved to be a very successful weekend for the Atoms, as they also overcame a 14-nil half time deficit to beat the Vale of Lune RU team in the final of their sevens competition the following day.