National League Three South West

Ivybridge 20,

Brixham 12

Ivybridge have a break from league action to­morrow when they tackle Teignmouth away in the Devon Se­nior Cup, with the seconds hosting Devonport at Cross-in-Hand, writes Tim Leigh.

The firsts are likely to be much changed from the team that continued Ivybridge’s stunning start to life in the big leagues last weekend when they rolled over Brixham at home.

Senior manager Neil Thomson said: ‘We’ll probably put out a bit of a development side, the league is certainly a bigger priority for us.

‘Some of the players are a bit bruised and battered after tough games, we need to give them a chance to recover’.

Recovery was definitely needed after a tough game against Brixham, with the home side showed admirable powers of concentration after a serious double injury to Brixham players Scott Puleston and Dean Squire occurred in the first minute of the game.

Puleston, a former Ivybridge player, and Squire collided trying to gather the restart, resulting in play being held up for well over an hour as an ambulance arrived and treated Puleston before taking him to Derriford.

Thomson expressed his sympathy to Brixham and the players, saying: ‘Scott used to play for us, he’s well known and very popular with everyone at the club.

‘I was actually away at the weekend but I watched the video of the game and it didn’t make very pleasant viewing, nobody wants to see that.’

While both sides’ players and the large crowd were obviously shocked at the incident, the game had to go on and it was Ivybridge who responded to the difficult situation better, with several phases resulting in fly-half Matt Grieveson opening the scoring with a drop goal.

Further tries by flanker Alex Hall and scrum-half Ben Watts helped Ivybridge into a comfortable 13-0 lead at half-time.

Thomson said: ‘It seems like we responded better, but really we just took our chances, there wasn’t that much between the two sides.’

Brixham got back in touch when they scored a converted try early in the second half, but Ivybridge opened up a match-winning lead with 10 minutes left when full-back Tom Scoles made a break before offloading to Lewis Paterson for a try.

With Grieveson converting the score was 20-7. Despite a late try from the Fishermen, Ivybridge held on to deny the visitors a losing bonus point and claim third spot in the table.

Thomson admitted he was very satisfied with where the club is and repeated his belief that the sky’s the limit for his players.

He said: ‘I’ve said before I don’t know how good this team can be.

‘We’ve had a great start, I know we’ve had a few home games but we just have to keep going hopefully avoid a November slump like we had last year.

‘It’s virtually the same team, they’re all a year older now and wiser, we’ve just got to keep pushing it.

‘The crowd has really got behind us, Lewis (Paterson) and Gareth (Elliott) have been doing a tremendous job on the development side of things and we just need to keep going.’