Defending champions Kingswood College, Kandy ran riot over St. Joseph’s College as they annihilated last year’s ‘B’ Division champions in their inter-school under-20 rugby league match by a massive 51 points to 8 at Royal College Sports Complex at Reid Avenue yesterday.

The proceedings during the first half were largely quiet as the Randle Hills boys took an 11-0 lead, but what followed after the break was mayhem.

Pre match predications were that this encounter would turn out to be a thriller after St. Joseph’s registered a sensational win against Trinity College, but it turned out to be an anticlimax as the Joes display of rugby was nothing better than that of the minnows.

In contrast, the huge score card does not reflect the true picture of the Kingswoodians too since they missed out a number of good moves that could have been transformed into points in spite of the fact that they reached almost a cricketing score of a half a century. The lads from Rnadle Hills did not live up to expectations particularly in ball handling and it seemed that they could not execute their game plan quite well. Had they been smarter in that department they could have reached a record breaking score this season to replace their previous best of 81-10 against Mahanama last week.

The Joes on the other hand were on the attack during the first 15 minutes of play but the stiff defence of Kingswood left no room for the Joes to budge. Thus, their attack eventually died a natural death. Lack of a proper game plan and being disjointed to a great extent caused their downfall in this encounter, while the aggressive play that they displayed in Pallekele last week against Trinity was hardly witnessed in yesterday’s game.

The winners collected their points off five goals, two tries and two penalties while Joes shot back with a solitary try and adding to that were two penalties.

It was almost a shared effort in respect to try scoring for the boys of Randle Hills and doing the honours were wing-three-quarter Indunil Bandara, scrum-half Mohamed Afzal, centre Sanjaya Weerasekara, wing-three-quarter Prabath Jayalath, full-back Rajitha Sansoni, flanker Jananath Dharmawardana and skipper cum fly-half Roshan Weeraratne. They all contributed with a try apiece while skipper Weeraratne as usual had his boots tight this day too and managed to put through five conversions bang on target in addition to two penalties that he fired across.

For St. Joseph’s it was second row S. Dambadeniya who scored the solitary try and taking the kicks was their number eight Malintha Soysa who succeeded in putting over two penalties to reduce the gap.