Sunday afternoon’s match between the San Diego Legion and Rugby United New York was a battle for the ages. The teams split the regular season games, each winning on the at the opponents home field. RUNY won the first week of the season at San Diego 25-23 and Legion pulled out a 29-19 in New York.
New York would draw first blood scoring five points on a try from RUNY prop Paddy Ryan line out deep inside the Legion defensive zone. Cathal Marsh would make the conversation to put RUNY up 7-0. In the 29th minute it was Faka’osi Pifeleti from the back of a ruck who’s teammates would push through Rugby United’s defense and Joe Pietersen would convert the kick to tie the game at 7-7. Pieterson would also convert a penalty goal with only three minutes left in the half and seemingly put Legion up going into the break. But RUNY wasn’t finished as Dylan Fawsitt scored New York’s second try. Cathal Marsh would miss the conversion as the teams headed to the locker room with a 12-10 RUNY halftime lead.
Legion head coach Rob Hoadley made halftime adjustments and it paid with immediate returns when Josh Furno dove across the try line just 65 seconds into the second half. Pieterson would convert to give San Diego a five point lead. Three minutes later New York would add another penalty goal to cut the San Diego lead down to two. Rugby United took advantage of their side of the field, putting the ball high into the sky which lead to several miscues by the Legion and would give RUNY great field position. After being turned away by the San Diego defense, Ben Foden would once again take advantage of the sun as Nate Augspurger couldn’t find the ball. Foden recovered his own kick and passed to James Denise who would score the try, Marsh the conversion and RUNY would take 22-17 lead with three quarters of the game complete.
In the closing ten minutes San Diego would apply pressure, but as they had throughout the game, turnovers would prove costly each time San Diego got close to the try line. As the final minutes closed in, the Legion would build the intensity and had an excellent scoring opportunity around the 75th minute, but was once again turned away by the New York defense.
It would all change for the Legion with 98 seconds remaining, JP du Plessis would recover a loose ball and run straight across the try line to tie the game. On his game tying try JP said “it’s a team effort from minute one to minute eighty. We kept fighting, kept fighting, things didn’t quite go our way. But that’s rugby I guess, on a day that it could go either way. I was just lucky that it came my way. It was the bounce of the ball, I was lucky to pick it up and managed to get across the line. And we still had to kick to win it, but I had trust in Joe Pietersen, he’s as accurate as they come.”
As the fans cheered and the team celebrated the come from behind last minute tie, Joe Pietersen was setting up for a very difficult conversion. Joe Pietersen’s expression was from a man who had been in this situation all his life, stepped back and put the ball through the middle of the uprights to give San Diego the 24-22 lead and the game. His thoughts as he was preparing for the kick “just kick, just kick and hope the wind does it’s work. It’s part of the job, you miss some of those and you kick some of those. I’ll take the ones I get and I’ll take the ones on the chin that I don’t get, today luckily we got it.”
Legion head coach Rob Hoadley’s thoughts after the game: “Great win, sensational finish to the game. I think the crowd got us over the line there. If you look at the game as a whole we weren’t very good. It was a really poor standard really, we gave away eight penalties in the first half, all from our forwards. We are going to have to tighten up our scrum and our line-out drive defense and just play sensible rugby. Our defense was solid but we’ve got to actually trust our system, and not undermine ourselves by putting ourselves in poor field position. We’re thrilled to get the win obviously and be in the final, but we have a lot of work to do before next weekend.” Hoadley’s emphasis going into next weekend “turnovers and discipline.”
Team captain Joe Pietersen said that “our biggest downfall today was lack of discipline. That just gives away field territory, that put us back deep in our half and we have to defend. Can’t really defend without ball position and that’s quite vital, we showed that towards the end where we hold onto the ball. Once we started building phases we were more dangerous.”
The San Diego Legion will play for the MLR Championship on Sunday, June 16 at 1 PM PDT against the Seattle Seawolves. Seattle defeated the surging Toronto Arrows 30-17 at home to advance to the championship game. San Diego took both games against Seattle during the regular season. Tickets are available at https://www.sdlegion.com/tickets-single-game/.