Barbarians destroyed by UWA (pics)

An injury and a late withdrawal saw the Cable Force Bunbury Barbarians blown away 66 – 0 by a strong UWA side at Leschenault Reserve on Saturday.

Picture gallery by Jon Gellweiler

Heading into the round three match the Barbarians were stung by a cruel last minute injury when starting fullback Percy Bulisovuva failed to overcome sore ribs from the previous week’s match against the Curtin Goats.

The news got even worse when flyhalf Jack Meadows was ruled out with a work trip to Adelaide.

After winning the toss UWA quickly went onto the attack with a series of well drilled raids at the ruck probing the Barbarian forwards.

Simon Best, Jamie O`Dea and the ever green Derek Hunter held firm time and again against the strong Students pack.

An unfortunate blood binning saw UWA grab the game by the scruff of the neck, with two very easy tries out wide exhibiting the class and talent of the Students.

As the half wore on the larger UWA scrum began to make it is mark and prevent the Barbarians from getting clean ball and in the shadows of half time the UWA fullback took two half chances to score and converted both tries to extend the lead to 28-0 at the half.

After a fire and brimstone speech the Barbarians came out firing to try wrest the game back onto their terms, yet a lineout misunderstanding allowed the visitors to open the second half scoring.

Seko Korosiva and Luke De Preez time and again linked up for some excellent passages of play yet the swamping defence of the students repeatedly denied the home side a chance to spin it wide.

Poor discipline sadly let the Bunbury side down with a yellow card and numerous penalties allowing UWA to blow out the score to 66-0 at the final siren.

Bunbury's second team trotted out to an almost herculean problem – attempting to hand the UWA fourth grade side its first loss since July 2012.

For the first 10 minutes of the game the home side took it to the Students. Jaz Koro, Ben Durrell and Scotty Fry all put on large hits in an attempt to rattle the visitors but as the hard but fair hits from both sides began to mount, so did the tempers of both sides.

After a few small spot fires the Barbarian half back Jimmy Smith reacted to a tackle from his opposing number and earned himself an early shower.

Down to 14 men the mountain in front of the Barbarians grew even steeper and in the minutes after the dismissal UWA quickly opened the scoring to jump out to a 12-0 lead.

As the first half crept close to closure, Captain Koro was able to bullock his way over the line and narrow the margin to 12-5 at the break.

After a few changes to try and cover the loss of Smith the Barbarians came out firing with some bone jarring defence denying UWA multiple times on the try line in the opening ten of the second half.

Just as the Barbarians started to get back into the contest the back three of UWA began to take advantage of the one man overlap to begin to scoring tries at a regular pace.

The final whistle saw the score 43-5 and the UWA Hippos two year undefeated streak claim another victim as they continued on their pursuit of title number six in a row.