Indiscipline and Heartbreak against Germania List
RC Luxembourg 33:35 Germania List
A thrilling game was decided in injury time by a combination of indiscipline from Luxembourg and unremitting determination from Germania.
Following their first victory in two years against local rivals, Hannover 78, Germania edged this fourth round tie against Luxembourg thanks to a last-minute penalty kick from the excellent Felix Hufnagel.
A couple of minutes earlier, Hufnagel had inexplicably missed what would have been a match-winning conversion from directly in front of the posts. This sent the Luxembourg crowd into rapture as it appeared to be a golden reprieve.
Germania had other ideas. Their rapid switching of play from left to right, with supporting runners creating options, kept putting the Luxembourg defence under pressure.
That pressure led to a series of penalties which, on another day, could have led to a yellow card. Today, the penalties were punishment enough.
After a slow opening to the match, Luxembourg clawed their way back into the first half with tries from forwards Jaco Gerber and Christian Olsen. But Bjarne Bormann touched down for Germania just before half-time, adding to Hufnagel’s two tries and conversions to take the score to 12:19 in Germania’s favour.
Luxembourg came out of the blocks with purpose in the second half; Dorian Terrou scoring a try that brought the scores level. But Germania’s Tino Deitz finished a relatively straight-forward move on the right to pull them back into the lead.
A few minutes later, Hufnagel chose to take the points from a penalty to leave Luxembourg with an eight-point deficit and 20 minutes to play.
Luxembourg emptied the bench to rejuvenate the energy levels. That triggered a come-back from the home team with tries from Davide Boero and another from Dorian Terrou. Luxembourg’s best player on the day, Eamon Riley, nailed both conversions from out wide to leave Luxembourg with a six-point lead.
But credit to Germania. Their depleted squad left them with few substitute options, so they stuck with the same 15 players for the entirety of the match. And those players engineered what appeared to be the decisive try under the posts before Hufnagel’s one mistake of the match when he missed the conversion.
With the clock in the red and a one-point deficit, Germania piled on the pressure that led to Hufnagel’s match-winning penalty.
Luxembourg came away with two precious bonus points taking their overall tally to eight so far this season. The consolation for Luxembourg is that they are taking points this season where they didn’t the season before.