
At one ground, there’s 105-0 in first grade, 92-0 in second grade and 66-0 in colts.
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Then, spread across the rest of the region in the Blowes Clothing Cup, there’s 101-0, 94-0, 83-0, 65-0, 63-0 and 73-7 – at least there’s a try in that one.
Still, it all makes for some fairly grim reading.
Dubbo Roos put the cleaners through Mudgee at No.1 Oval on Saturday, across three grades, running in an accumulative scoreline of 269-0 – the first grade encounter was called off with seven minutes to go, too.
That’s too many tries to count, so let’s focus on another set of numbers – 435 and seven.
That’s how many points the Wombats have leaked over the first seven rounds of the season – an embarrassing 62 a game.
The best teams in the comp, Bathurst Bulldogs and Orange Emus, haven’t conceded 62 points yet throughout the opening two months of the season.
Really, with leaky defences like that, we should have seen Saturday’s shellacking coming. And, scarily, it’ll only get worse.
There will be more scorelines like this as winter’s cold harsh chill begins to blanket the region.
I’ve not seen two scorelines of 100 in one season, let alone two in the one round.
What’s going to happen to Mudgee at Endeavour Oval if Parkes beat the Wombats by 90 in round one and then Emus go to Northparkes Oval and smash the Boars by a ton?
Someone get the record books out. That, or maybe Emus can trot out the club’s second grade side instead.
So, what can be done?
The Wombats’ returned to the Central West Rugby Union’s top tier, the Blowes Clothing Cup, in 2014, and the club has done reasonably well in that time.
But this season has been an abomination.
You can’t have a side getting beaten every week by monumental margins. It’s not a good look for the game, or the club. And, you can’t have a first grade competition with a mercy rule. That’s just embarrassing.
So, does Mudgee belong in the Blowes Clothing Cup?
Based on those numbers alone, probably not. But the main CWRU competition needs the Mudgee club in it. At the start of this season we were talking about a top tier, six team premiership – and everyone had Mudgee as one of the ‘big six’.
Of course, competitions go around in cycles – teams get better as other teams get worse, and right now, in the Blowes Clothing Cup, it appears we’ve got a couple of sides reaching the top of their cycles and others battling at the bottom of the trough.
But surely we don’t just sit idly by and let the cycles run their course … that can’t be the plan.
Last week Bill Pulver, Australian Rugby Union boss, came to Orange for a long lunch and promised grass roots funding was on its way.
That’s all good and well, but that funding would have been handy yesterday.
Funding is crucial to ensure the CWRU’s top tier can continue to be a viable competition, otherwise we’re going to continue to see the best get better and the teams battling begin to struggle even more.
To be fair, the lopsided results aren’t restricted to the rugby – CYMS hammered Lithgow in Group 10, and if tries were five points the score would have been 98-10.
While Dubbo CYMS has also gone past the century mark in Group 11 this season, walloping Westside by a 100 in round one.