OMBAC Beats Dallas for Berth in Rugby Championship Game

The table is set for the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club’s rugby team, and all the guys have to do is show up in uniform and dig in. The main course is the Steinlager/USA Rugby National Club championship. It’s there sitting on a platter.

Winning today’s final against the Washington (D.C.) Rugby Club should be as easy as pie for OMBAC, which beat the Dallas Harlequins, 21-15, in Saturday’s semifinals in front of 2,500 at Robb Field. Earlier this year, Dallas beat Washington, 33-0.

Maybe the tournament officials should have crowned OMBAC as champs Saturday. OMBAC (27-1) and Dallas (29-2) are said to be the two best teams in the tournament. Washington struggled to beat the Chicago Lions, 21-17 in sudden death.

Later, OMBAC had an easy a time with the Harlequins.

So easy that they jumped out to a 21-3 lead then started loafing in the second half. With 10 minutes left, Dallas was making a bid to tie game and send it to overtime. It took a late goal-line stand by OMBAC to preserve the victory.

“We’re happy with the win, but we’re not happy with the way we finished,” said team captain Mike Saunders, who is trying to help OMBAC win its third national title in four years. “We got complacent toward the end. To (Dallas’) credit, they didn’t.”

Said OMBAC Coach Bing Dawson: “We got ahead enough that we went a little flat.”

OMBAC won by six. It should have won by 16 and could have won by 26.

The hosts took a 3-0 lead early when fly-half Jason McVeigh, the team’s designated kicker, drilled a 25-yard penalty kick through the uprights. But then McVeigh missed six kicks in a row. OMBAC led, 15-0, at halftime but could have been up 33-0 had McVeigh converted all his scoring chances.

OMBAC won because it didn’t blow any chances on the ground. In fact, it capitalized on two costly Harlequin mistakes. Wing man John Lee made it 7-0 when he scored a try (similar to a touchdown in football) after taking a pitch from Saunders and breaking two tackles on a 10-yard run. Then, because Dallas couldn’t handle the ensuing kickoff, Lee scored another try, scooping up the loose ball and beating three defenders across the line.

That made it 11-0. Dallas later turned the ball over again near its own try line, and Tom Short scored to make it 15-0. The Harlequins outscored OMBAC, 15-6, in the second half but had trouble all game with ball-handling and appeared to be physically overmatched by OMBAC.

“We were the ones who were scared about how we were going to handle the ball, because we’ve had a month off,” said Lee, a Dallas native. “But when we pressure teams we tend to play very well. We dictated the pace for the first 60 minutes, and I don’t think they were used to this pace. We started to rest on our laurels at the end.”

“We’re usually slow starters,” said Dallas player/coach Brett Taylor. “I told the guys if we turned 10-0 at the half we’d take them. But 15 was a bit too much. We made a couple stupid mistakes in the beginning.”

Dawson said he’s not concerned about another OMBAC letdown in today’s 2 p.m. championship game.

“We control our own fate,” he said. “Washington is a good club. It could go either way.”

But Dawson said his 1991 team reminds him of the 1988 squad, which captured OMBAC’s first national championship with a vengeance, beating the Milwaukee Rugby Club, 29-13.

“They had tunnel vision,” he said. “(That victory) was amazingly purposeful.”