Catt pounces to polish off the Worcester revivalists

Worcester 7 - London Irish 9

Mike Catt turned from villain to hero to claim victory for London Irish with a 79th minute drop-goal in this turgid Powergen Cup sixth round contest.

When the half began Catt was kicking his heels in the sin-bin, having killed the ball under the stern eye of the referee Hugh Watkins, who had earlier dished out the same fate to the home side's Chris Horsman and Thomas Lombard. But Catt's shot stretched his side's lead to an unassailable 9-0 - which was rather fortunate for the visitors, given the penalty try Worcester claimed in the 82nd and last minute, which the scrum-half Matt Powell converted, drop-goal fashion.

Catt and his team should have had one foot in the quarter-finals at half-time, but had more than the fly-half Mark Mapletoft's two missed penalties and fluffed drop-goal attempt to blame for that. While the home side were down to 13 men for five minutes as Horsman and Lombard's stints in the sin-bin overlapped, the visitors set their hearts on crossing for a try.

In doing so they spurned two kickable penalty attempts, including one in the shadow of Worcester's posts. They piled pressure on the home side during that period, but failed to punish Horsman's folly in playing the ball with his hand from an offside position and Lombard's equally dim-witted decision to do likewise a few minutes later with his foot.

Even so, the Exiles may have some justification if they feel aggrieved about Watkins' ruling when they had the put-in at a close-range scrum. With their numerical superiority, Irish were dominant at the set-piece and yet found themselves penalised just at the moment when they could have expected to profit from their decision to speculate on tries rather than accumulate points from penalty awards.

But Watkins' decision apart, the fact that the Exiles found themselves only 6-0 ahead at the break instead of at least twice and perhaps three times that, was no one's fault but their own. Worcester gained much encouragement from the visitors' inability to make their chances count, a situation that prompted the visiting coach, Gary Gold, to replace Mapletoft with a bona fide Irishman, Barry Everitt, after 52 minutes.

The momentum of play was building against the Exiles by that stage and the longer the game wore on, the greater was the intensity of the home side's attacks. However, intensity was one thing and creativity another.

Worcester had oodles of patience with ball in hand in the last quarter, but not the necessary cutting edge to go with their excellent approach work. And after Everitt sent the visitors on a rare late visit to the home 22, Catt took the only option available to him to drop that all-important goal.

Worcester showed their pride with the manner in which they battled back upfield to claim their penalty try, but it was too little, too late.

Worcester: T Delport; D O'Leary (P Sampson, 53), D Rasmussen (T Hayes, 66), T Lombard, G Pieters; J Brown, M Powell; T Windo (capt; L Fortey, 63) , A van Niekerk, C Horsman, T Collier, C Gillies, S Viali (L Fortey, 25-33), B MacLeod-Henderson, D Hickey.

London Irish: M Horak; J Bishop, G Appleford (K Barrett, 54-58), M Catt, S Staniforth; M Mapletoft (B Everitt, 52), P Hodgson; D Wheatley, R Russell (D Paice, 69), R Hardwick, N Kennedy (R Strudwick, 63), B Casey, D Danaher, P Murphy (R Reid, 60), K Dawson (capt; P Gustard, 60).

Referee: H Watkins (Neath).