The scene was set for a great day, a light sprinkling of snow, 140 members enjoying the club Christmas lunch, the trabant fully serviced, tuned up,polished and ready to go with all hopes high that by about 3:45pm it would be traded in for a newer model.

Well, I took some stick last week for the Clarksonesk metaphor concerning the performance against Darlington, so this week I'll stick to the facts.

City were deserved winners with 4 tries a conversion and penalty to Park's two penalties kicked by Phil Morse in the absence of Marcus Rutter who was sidelined due to a dead leg sustained in training on Wednesday. Although the Park pack utterly destroyed the Durham City scrum, there was no penetration and the back's apart from Scotty at scrum half and Griff at full back were poor on the day.

Let's hope Santa brings an early Christmas present next week at home to Gateshead.

PERCY PARK 6 – 20 DARLINGTON

To say Percy Park didn’t fire on all cylinders would be somewhat of an understatement, and it has to be said the performance was more like an eastern block trabant firing on one cylinder, and to continue the motoring analogy Park rarely got out of first gear. 

PERCY PARK 24 – 12 CARLISLE

The unprecedented rainfall in Cumbria in the previous week meant the game was switched from Warwick Road to Preston Avenue as Carlisle’s pitches were waterlogged. The visitors didn’t have the best of preparations either with their late rearranged coach not turning up, so they had to travel to North Shields by car. This didn’t show in their performance however as the started with a bang, and had much of the early possession.