A visit to the Forest of Dean is never easy and Chinnor soon found themselves on the back foot. For the first 15 minutes Cinderford were camped in the Chinnor half with attack after attack being stifled by a resolute Chinnor defence.
Eventually Armitage and Hannay broke into Cinderford’s half and the pack took possession up to Cinderford’s 22 metre area to relieve the pressure on Chinnor. Chinnor’s ventures into Cinderford’s territory were few and far between but always looked threatening. Tom Burns broke from a set scrum within the Cinderford half and took play deep into the Cinderford territory. Then a driving maul took play to the try line where Burns was pushed over to score and open Chinnor’s account. Sam Angell converted.
10 minutes later, Chinnor put a deep penalty kick close to Cinderford’s try line. Chinnor won the line out and a rolling maul put Jamie Townsend over for Chinnor’s second try which Angell converted to give them a 14 – 0 lead. Cinderford soon responded with a 40m penalty kick from fly half, James Moffat.

Chinnor had a poor start to the second half with unforced errors giving Cinderford two penalties, one of which was converted by Moffat. This gave Cinderford renewed confidence to maintain their attack. Then a Cinderford knock on in the Chinnor 22 metre area was fly kicked 60m up field by Henry Lamont with the supporting Bertie Hopkin gathering possession to score near the posts allowing him to convert his own try and increase Chinnor’s lead to 9 – 21.
Cinderford replied with increasing pressure on Chinnor’s line causing C.J. Osazuwa to be yellow carded for a technical foul and allowing Moffat to convert his third penalty. Chinnor had to dig deep for the next 10 minutes to defend with only 14 players but they succeeded in preventing any further score from Cinderford.

Driving runs by Armitage, Castle and Lamont ensured that there were no further constructive attacks from Cinderford.
With 5 minutes to go, scrum half Greg Goodfellow sold one of his trademark dummies breaking on the blindside to put Hopkin away for a 30m dash to score an unconverted try in the corner. This gave Chinnor another bonus point and maintains their position at the top of the league, despite this being not one of their better performances.

Next week sees the vital top of the table clash against Old Elthamians at Kingsey Road.