IVYBRIDGE beat Marlborough 45-43 in the basement battle at Cross-in-Hand, but only after a re-count!

Marlborough thought they had won it after coming back from 25-3 and 32-17 down to ‘win’ 43-42. What had been missed was a Matt Grieveson penalty for Ivybridge, which actually put them 45-36 up going into stoppage time.

A combination of human errors by the referee and also the scoreboard operator meant points were not added on at the right times in the latter part of the match.

It was only after that the match official and one of two advisors watching him, got together in the dressing room for 20 minutes after the game that the mistake was realised.

“I’ve never been involved with a game ending like that,” said Steve Atkinson, the Ivybridge skills coach. “We knew the score, but there was a bit of a debate. Luckily there were two assessors here.”

The revised outcome probably won’t make much difference to Ivybridge’s eventual fate as they are ten points adrift at the bottom of the table and need an improbable set of co-incidences to stay up.

Ivybridge led 18-3 at the half-time whistle thanks to tries from Adam Lilley and George Vertessy, plus one conversion and two penalties from Grieveson.

Charlie Teague and James Cantin added converted tries to assist the Bridge into a 32-17 lead with 20 minutes to go.

Ding-dong it continued with Marlborough getting back to 35-29, although the scoreboard said it was 35-27.

Wes Vermigle’s try, converted by Grieveson, opened up a corrected lead of 42-29, which became 45-29 when Giles Clarke added a penalty. Now it was Ivybridge’s turn to have a score missed as the Clarke penalty did not register on the board.

Back came Marlborough with two tries, both converted, to snatch what they thought were five valuable points in their own fight to stay up.

Ivybridge have no game at first-team level this Saturday.