Supported by a strong pack, East Carolina muscled past Furman 19-0 Saturday \u00a0to hand the Paladins their first loss of the season.<\/p>\n
The contest was played under wet conditions in Greenville, North Carolina. The Pirates opened the game with a try in the forward pack near the 20-minute mark as both teams sought to establish their game.<\/p>\n
The Pirates bullied in another try 15 minutes later as the ball squirted out of a ruck and bounced into the hands fortunate Pirate forward with a green field ahead.<\/p>\n
The Paladins did have two apparent tries annulled by the official that were controversial. One was called held up. On a wide kick to the try zone by fly half Jacob Milchuck, winger Adam Miller appeared to outrace an ECU fullback to the ball in time to apply downward pressure.<\/p>\n
But the official saw it differently and awarded a 22-meter drop kick to ECU.<\/p>\n
In the second half the Pirates added a try and conversion near the midway mark.<\/p>\n
For their part, Furman did maintain possession for better part of the second half and had plenty of chances near the try line squandered by knock-ons and miscommunication.<\/p>\n
Playing without starting locks Trent Pannell and Richard Budd, Furman\u2019s scrum was disjointed. Consequently, the Furman backline seldom received clean ball and generated little forward motion against the hard-charging East Carolina defenders.<\/p>\n
\u201cECU had a solid team,\u201d said Coach John Roberts. \u201cWe had plenty of chances to put ourselves in a position to make it a competitive game. But ultimately we lost to better team today. We did not play well and deserved defeat.\u201d<\/p>\n
The squad returns to action Saturday in a 1 p.m. home game against undefeated Appalachian State. The winner of this all-important contest advances to the Southern Rugby Conference Final Four play-offs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Supported by a strong pack, East Carolina muscled past Furman 19-0 Saturday \u00a0to hand the Paladins their first loss of the season. The contest was played under wet conditions in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-athletics","category-rugby"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}