Bees only narrowly defeated by high-flying Darlington Mowden Park

Bees’ flanker Darren Forder believes the Bees can take heart from their narrow defeat to high-flying Darlington Mowden Park in National Two North.

The north east side had come into the match at Portway on the back of a 14-try rout of Dudley Kingswinford the previous weekend.

However, they required a late Gavin Painter penalty and a Tom Hodgson try to snatch victory and end the Bees’ unbeaten home record.

“It was a performance we can build on,” Forder said. “Darlington are a good team and we could have won that.

“I don’t think there is any team in the top four who are going to be much different to them and this performance will give us a bit more belief that we can beat those top teams.”

Having seen their scrums dismantled in the early stages of a thrilling contest, the hosts began to find parity and then dominate the Darlington pack to give themselves a foothold.

Yet, despite tries from scrum-half Rod Petty and winger Dai Evans, together with two Adam Canning penalties and a conversion, Darlington hit back to take the bonus-point success.

Forder added: “The boys showed a lot of heart in defence, we are disappointed to come away with just the one point. “Coming into the game, off the results that they had, Darlington had plenty of confidence and belief.

“It took a little while to sort out what was going in the scrum, but once we got on top we started to play our game, play our phases of it, which was good.’’