Alice Walker

Alice Walker

Coming off of their first loss in 16 games, the Redmen rugby team responded with an authoritative 69-10 victory over the Sherbrooke Vert-et-Or in the Quebec University Rugby League men’s semifinal on Friday afternoon. It was a dominant performance by the entire McGill team, who scored early and often to quickly put the game out of Sherbrooke’s reach.

The Redmen were motivated to put their October 24 loss to Concordia behind them. They played intensely, physically dictating the play. Centre Sam Skulsky scored two minutes into the game and wing Gideon Balloch followed with a successful conversion. McGill didn’t  let up, scoring seven consecutive tries in the first half and leading 45-0 at the break.

“We took practice a lot more seriously after the loss,” said wing Brendan O’Sullivan, who scored two points off a successful conversion. “We realized that we had some competition in this league and we needed to start taking things more seriously. We just put our goals against Sherbrooke to match them man to man physically and play them really intense. When we play to that level and play with that intensity and that passion, our talent comes through and we can pile on the points.”

Balloch echoed the sentiment, saying that the team was extremely focused, hoping to start the playoffs on the right note.

“Everyone was really motivated [coming into the game],” he said. “We had lost our last regular season game so it was a return to form for us. We scored within the first two minutes: [that was] pretty impressive. Just overall the team worked better together. We worked back and forth better than we had all year. We hardly ever let up, it was really good.”

Balloch led the Redmen charge with an incredible 22 points. He scored two tries and added six conversions, but he was quick to attribute his individual success to the entire team’s effort.

“I was just lucky,” he humbly explained. “Because I kick for the team, when [the team] score[s] a lot of tries [I end up] scor[ing] a lot of points out there. I also finished with two tries that were set up by my teammates. I think everyone who scored tries had to credit their teammates.”

O’Sullivan was not as quick to attribute Balloch’s success to luck.

“One thing Gideon brings to the table is consistency and effort,” he said. “His kicks are spot on and that doesn’t come from nowhere. He practices his kicking every practice and he loves to kick. He’s always giving it 100 per cent, really running hard, running his lines.”

The McGill offence was running on all cylinders on Friday as seven different players scored tries. The team’s defence was equally impressive as they shut out Sherbrooke in the first half to ensure that a comeback was not in the cards.

A scary moment occurred in the second half when the game had to be postponed for 30 minutes as a Sherbrooke player left the game with a serious neck injury. Even though McGill earned a yellow card for the incident, Balloch explained that he didn’t “think [the hit] was meant to be malicious.”

McGill now heads to the QURL final against the Concordia Stingers. Concordia won 13-12 over Bishop’s in the other semifinal to set up a rematch with McGill. In the regular season the Stingers ended McGill’s 15-game winning streak with a 17-10 victory. The Redmen are excited to get the chance to avenge their only conference loss of the season.

“We’re definitely looking forward to playing Concordia,” Balloch said. “I’m glad Concordia won. Playing them again is something we want to do.”

The Redmen are confident that a rematch with the Stingers will turn out differently if they play like they did against the Vert-et-Or.

“We just have to match [Concordia] physically man to man and play with the intensity that we played against Sherbrooke,” explained O’Sullivan. “We cannot give up silly penalties and [we have to] play really, really hard defence and then look for the offensive opportunities to create themselves.”

“We’ll be practicing five times this week,” said Balloch. “So we’ll have a lot of time this week to get everything down and as perfect as we can for the finals.”