Rugby – Narrow defeat ends Maccabi’s season

IT’S been a very positive season,” Aaron Stern told The AJN after the Maccabi Rugby Club narrowly lost their Meldrum Cup preliminary final to the North Cronulla Sea Lice. The Blues led the match for a solid half hour, before the Sea Lice came from behind to steal a 26-29 win. Stern said the match was a real tussle, but the Blues ultimately ran out of steam at the end. “We were quite low on numbers with a lot of injuries,” said Stern. “We have up to 17 guys that are either injured or away and I think if we had even two more players we probably would have won, but we just ran out of steam.”

Benjamin Hirschman, who scored a try, was Maccabi’s player of the match, with Harrison Stein, Greg Diamond and Chad Bobrow all getting on the scoresheet too. While the defeat ends their season, Stern said the next few years are looking promising with the team heading in the right direction. They ended the regular season in seventh place, with a healthy 7-6 win/loss record. “We finished near the bottom of the table last year, but this season we’ve ended seventh because we just lost the game on the weekend said “Stern.

All in all we’ve got quite a young team and it seems next year hopefully everyone is coming back, so they will be more experienced. There are also some good players coming in next year that I know about.”