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No way through: Stour's Tom Jordan is stopped in his tracks at a muddy Manchester.

Manchester 27, Stourbridge 7 In arctic conditions Stourbridge's promotion hopes were dealt a severe blow at muddy Manchester as they allowed their rivals to pick up a vital five points.

Losing the toss and playing with the wind in the first half, Stour were hopeful of coming away with a first-half lead but this was not to be and a fifth minute injury to Ben Hughes left the line-out struggling all afternoon.

The hosts went ahead after 10 minutes when Stuart Eboral stormed over after a strike against the head.

Manchester followed that up with an Andre Wilson try.

The two quick scores seemed to awake the visitors with Ben Gerry going over after a maul and Ally Bressington converting for a 10-7 half time score.

At the break, Adam Sturdy replaced Adrian Olver and Tom Richardson replaced Dan Pointon suffering from an earlier shoulder injury.

The weather conditions progressively worsened over the final 40 minutes and despite a couple of incisive breaks by Rod Petty it was rare for Stourbridge to come out of their half.

Knock-ons and line-out errors contributed to Stour's woes.

Richardson's first clearance attempt was charged down by second row Paul Ralph in the 53rd minute and on 63 minutes he again scored after a Stourbridge line-out went disastrously wrong.

The last few minutes witnessed a red card for stamping for Duncan White more out of frustration than anything else and a yellow card for Gareth Wynne for retaliation followed by Paul Ralph's hat-trick try and Manchester's fifth try.

Stourbridge: Jarvis, Bressington, Cook, Billig, Hall, Petty, Pointon ( Richardson), Olver (Sturdy), Gerry, Tideswell (Rowlands), Muldowney, Hughes (Knight), White, Jordan, Jenner.

9:34am Thursday 3rd April 2008

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