Teachers can count themselves lucky to have gained two points from this First XV Amstel League game at National Sports Club yesterday.

Police missed five early kickable penalties and turned around at half-time with a 7-0 deficit after a Mike Montgomery try for Teachers, which was completely against the run of play.

Police had dominated the set pieces with a bigger pack of forwards and reverted to the old 10-man style of rugby, which saw Gary Osborne pinning Teachers in their own half for most of the game.

Early in the second half, Teachers gave away two further penalties and on changing kickers to Osborne they eagerly converted these infringements to points bringing the score 7-6.

Both sets of forwards lost advantage in mauls by not getting the ball out quickly enough, the new law now giving the scrum to the team who did not set them all up.

With 15 minutes left a fumble by Shane DeSilva gave Teachers a five-metre scrum from which Nick Ball cleverly fed Andrew Correia, who waltzed over the line to make it 12-6.

Police's hearts dropped and Teachers scored another try when referee Kieron Peacock used the advantage law after a knock-on by Osborne, which allowed the Teachers back to spin the ball to Roman Romeo to go over on the corner.

A late revival by Police saw Sean Field score a well-deserved try after some good forward driving.

Renegades 45, Mariners 12 In what must be regarded as the best second-half display of rugby seen at Nationals this season, Mariners earned a lot of respect by "drawing'' the second half 12-12 when they scored two excellent tries against two by their opponents.

After conceding 33 points to nothing in the first half, captain Dave Conway's decision to run at Renegades showed that Mariners are no longer pushovers in the second half.

On the contrary. After yesterday's second-half performance and last week's historic defeat of Police, Mariners are on the road to recovery.

Certainly Conway must take a lot of the credit for this with an outstanding performance of running and tackling.

Even the Amstel Player of the Week went to a Mariners' player, Gavin Dublin, after he had spearheaded several attacks.

The forward battle was easily won by Renegades even though only Roy Dunn, Danny Forsyth and Pat Bryan were the only regular First XV players.

Mariners produced poor quality ball from line-outs and their back row was rarely seen at the breakdown.

In the first half, the Renegades backs showed that they are surely the best attacking combination on the Island with Barry Whitehead in particular running around his opponents with ease.

For Renegades, Whitehead and Sean Kelly crossed for two tries, with Lawrence Moore, Gorrie and Matt Gorman adding the other tries. Phil Heaney converted five tries.

However, the best try of the game was scored by Mariners 10 minutes from the end when they rammed the ball from a scrum 20 yards from their own line, Dublin and Conway combining to break through weak Renegades tackling with Conway scoring under the post.

The other Mariners try was again instrumented by Conway who gave Dublin a pass to feed Dennis Faries who crossed over the corner.