North One East: Cleckheaton 5 Dinnington 9 

CLECKHEATON suffered their fifth straight defeat as an anticipated difficult January extended into early February with a low-scoring defeat by improving Dinnington.

The second-from-bottom visitors battled manfully on an extremely wet and boggy pitch, but the hosts only had their lack of discipline to blame.

They received two yellow cards, making it four sin-binnings in the last three matches, and thus played for a quarter of the match with only 14 men, while their peanlty count also made for poor reading.

Dinnington collected all their points from Cleckheaton’s foul play, and the home players must learn that the fault lies with them as indviduals, rather than team-mates or the referee.

Little purchase could be found under foot for either fast-flowing rugby or even for driving the ball in the maul, and Dinnington enjoyed the lion’s share of possession and territory in the opening 20 minutes but Cleckheaton’s defence was top drawer and the South Yorkshire men could not penetrate it.

On one of Cleck’s first forays into their opposition’s 22, a try seemed imminent when, with penalty advantage, Mike Swetman noticed Mikey Hayward in acres of space on the stand-side of the pitch.

A perfectly weighted crossfield kick would have seen a simple try but unfortunately the ball was struck poorly and, rather than dropping into the hands of the wingman, went flying over the dead-ball line and booked itself in for a mocha-choco-latté at the adjoining Starbucks Drive-Thru.

It was 0-0 at half-time, but the second half started very positively for Cleckheaton, and before long a penalty close to Dinnington’s line, and good line-out drills, led to a rolling maul got man of the match Thiu Barnard over the whitewash.

Dinnington hit back when Andy Piper was sin-binned for not rolling away, and the successful kick brought the score to 5-3, but Cleckheaton continued to press, with Hayward trying his hardest to get purchase on the boggy turf and Jack Seddon, Josh Plunkett, Joey Carly and Ryan Piercy all making half-breaks.

Dinnington were awarded another kick in front of goal, which put themselves into a one-point lead and a few minutes later, Ronan Evans was binned on behalf of the team, for committing another in a line of infringements.

With time drawing to a close, Dinnington kicked a third penalty goal and then ran down the clock to claim the four points.

In a twist of fate, the losing bonus point that Cleckheaton got from the game, elevated them above Huddersfield YMCA in the table.