The visitors started the brighter and applied a huge amount of pressure to the Avon line in the first 10 minutes but excellent home defence kept them out, forcing Burnham to settle for a Piper penalty to open the scoring. Avon responded with an outstanding try from 70 metres when James Leeming was put into space on the outside before racing away and perfectly timing his return pass to scrum half Chris Flavell to score in the corner. Flavell added the extras from the touchline.

After 30 minutes, Avon lost influential former skipper Scott Book to a hamstring injury and had to reshape their pack. Burnham were happy to keep the ball for long periods even though they were struggling to make many inroads into the Avon defence. Their patience eventually paid off though when they found a gap to take a single point lead going into half time with a well-worked team try.

Avon started the second half with a man in the sin bin and Burnham soon took advantage by creating an overlap against the stretched defence to touch down another converted try. They increased their lead following a speculative offload which found a supporting team mate in space to score under the posts.

Despite facing a 22-7 deficit, Avon were not playing badly with their solid scrum causing the visitors a few problems and winning their own lineout ball comfortably despite the absence of lineout specialist Scott Book. Meanwhile, their backline had the edge in the outside channels with new recruits Flavell and Escher Le Duc looking dangerous in attack.

As the last quarter approached, coach Kai Harwood made some tactical changes with veteran Damian Sawyer coming on at scrum half, allowing Flavell to switch to fly half and introducing former youth team player Adam Hinchcliff-Walz into the second row. These changes immediately paid dividends as Flavell chipped ahead and regathered to score under the posts to narrow the gap. With Avon seeking to stretch the visitors defence, prop Chris Mutlow put the electric Leeming away up the right touchline to outpace the defence for a well-deserved try. Flavell added his 3rd conversion to bring the scoreline back to 22-21 with 10 minutes remaining.

Burnham once again put a number of phases together and picked up their bonus point try with a score wide out on the right which Piper converted via the crossbar. Once again Avon came back with Leeming chipping through for Josh Harding-Wyatt to pick up his first try of the season. The game restarted with 30 seconds to go and Avon managed to work their way back to the visitors 22 but this time they could not quite get the score and had to make do with just the 2 bonus points.

Afterwards, Director of Rugby Clive Book reflected “Although we have suffered 2 narrow home defeats against some decent sides, there is a huge amount of optimism around the club as the new recruits start to settle in and some very positive performances which we look forward to taking away to Nailsea and Backwell next week.”