Under the warm sun Saturday afternoon at Masich Place Stadium, the Prince George Gnats played their best game of the season, but it wasn't enough to cook the goose of the Terrace Northmen.
The Gnats gave the visitors trouble in the early going but didn't have an answer for Jared Stephens. Give him the ball and the 27-year-old inside centre transforms into a two-legged gazelle. Stephens scored three tries in a 24-10 win over the Gnats.
Terrace came into the game having already clinched the Central Interior Rugby Union regular-season title to guarantee a trip to the provincial club championship.
The Gnats had a much better show of resistance than they displayed three weeks ago in Terrace when they lost to the Northmen 51-0. Despite that lopsided score, Stephens, who played Division 1 rugby this year for the Nanaimo Hornets, knew based on his own experience playing the Gnats his team was in for a much more difficult rematch.
"I don't think the Northmen have won in P.G. for the last four or five years – these guys are an incredible team and they absolutely make you work for it," said Stephens.
"The most dangerous thing about this team is their size and their experience, they just pound it up the gut and they hit you. We knew that this would be our biggest battle of the year in terms of how we had to stick in there and make the tackles on these big guys running at us. We have probably the best forward packs in the league and the reason we can get (the ball) out to the backs is our forwards stick in there and battle it out. Those tries were because of our pack in there."
The home side got off to a great start Saturday only a few minutes in when Gnats fly half Troy McKenzie intercepted a pass on the fly and scampered 50 metres before he ran out of steam and was tackled 25m shy of the end zone. Ball possession time weighed heavily in the Gnats' favour the first 15 minutes and they were finally rewarded when Stephan Moser took off on a 60m cross-field run against the grain and went in untouched for the opening try.
The Northmen and their Kiwi connection – New Zealanders Carl Nattrass and Chris Hampton – got them back on even terms not long after Moser scored. Hampton turned on the jets for a long sideline run and while getting wrapped up by a pack of Gnats he handed off to Nattrass to complete the try.
Moser scored again from 35m out and Stephens countered with the longest major of the day, breaking free from at least five tackle attempts on a 65m romp. At that point, with about 10 minutes to play before halftime, the Northmen were starting to show why they are a first-place team. They won most of the physical battles and tackled effectively, which kept the Gnats pinned deep in their own zone, a trend which carried into the second half.
The ball proved hard to pry loose from the steady-handed Stephens and he collected his second try from 20m and the convert was good, putting Terrace up 17-10 with 21 minutes left. The Gnats were forced into a few panic kicks trying to boot the Northmen out of the danger zone but their attempts didn't win back much of the ground they lost to their swarming opponents.
The Gnats had a bit of a size advantage and Brian Rivard reminded Northmen hooker Jonathan Doane what it feels like to be hit by a freight train when they collided head-on in the hit of the game midway through the second half. Rivard crawled off the field to the sidelines and both had to sit out a play or two but went right back in once the pain had subsided. As big and as physical as the Gnats were, they showed their fatigue in the late stages and the Northmen pounced one more time. Stephens drove the ball in deep and scored on a short run, which was converted successfully by kicker Tyson Stoochnoff to complete the scoring.
"They've got lots of youth, lots of big boys, with a couple of imports with lots of skill and they were a little fitter and wore us down," said the 45-year-old McKenzie, whose team last won the league in 2011. "We hung in there for the first half but I think we only got into their half of the field twice in the second half and that's not enough. You're not going to score from there in rugby.
"That was our best turnout. They brought a really good squad and we kept it close. They've beat everybody quite easily, home and away throughout the season, and this is as close as anybody's stuck with them."
Northmen veterans George Da Costa and Graham Bayles took over the coaching duties this year in Terrace and successfully recruited younger athletes like Stephens, who honed his running skills as a soccer player. A regular practice schedule made all the difference in turning the team's fortunes.
"They're a good young bunch of boys and they needed some discipline and that's all it was," said Da Costa, who moved Stephens from the forward line to the back row this year. "Maybe it's a coaching thing but they just needed to get their heads wrapped around playing rugby, they were a little bit scattered.
"We had some players we had to move around and all it was was a bit of line-juggling and putting the right people in the key positions and now we're starting to win."
Terrace will represent northern B.C. at the Saratoga Cup independent club 15s championship in September in Penticton. The Northmen, who finished with a perfect 4-0 record, ended the three-year reign of the Williams Lake Rustlers as CIRU champions. The Gnats finished with a 1-3 record, equal to that of the Rustlers, who claimed second based on point differential.
