After what felt like an eternity Malpas made the New Year tip to Crickhowell for their first league fixture of 2018.
And with a bare 15 players the signs didn't look that good & after 15 minutes most people would have thought the match was over as a competition as Crickhowell's back line tore the visiting side to shreds with three well worked tries.
It was after conceding the third try that Malpas decided to stop arguing with each other and with that the larger Malpas pack started to gain a bit of momentum and after 25 minutes they found themselves in the home sides half (You can laugh but we didnt get out of our half for at least 20 odd minutes) after a sucession of penalties at the scrum Malpas attacked the Crickhowell line and veteran forward Mark Cox went over for the visiting sides first try, this was closely followed by Luke Dymonds try to take the half time socre to 21-12.
The 2nd half started off more or less the same as the first with Crickhowell running at the Malpas forwards and managimng to find a gap big enough to drive a bus through the home teams winger broke through and it seemed as all he had to do was flop over for Crickhowell's bonus point try but for an outstanding covering tackle from Jay Jay Whitehead ably assited by Kieran Williams & Neil Parkinson.
The game plodded along with both teams content to battle it out on the halfway line until chubby outside half Bryan Radford made a telling break and would have scored only for a Crickhowell forward to lay offside stopping the momentum, from the penalty Coach Phil Handley took the quick tap spun the ball wide only for flanker Craig Allen to run into his own player, from the resulting Crickhowell scrum Malpas drove them off their own ball with Malpas captain Courtney Athay picking the ball up and dropping over the try line.
Overall two equally matched sides and as the final score of 24-25 not much between them
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