Shaw suffers serious injury as Bristol buckle

STEVE BALE

Bristol 12 Transvaal 26

Simon Shaw, the 6ft 9in England A lock, seriously dislocated his left ankle as Bristol subsided to defeat by South Africa's greatest - but also greatly below strength - provincial side at the Memorial Ground last night. The injury-prone 22-year-old will almost certainly have to miss the rest of the season.

Someone up there did not want this game to finish the right side of midnight. The kick-off had already been delayed by 15 minutes in order to accommodate the hundreds queuing outside and then after eight minutes there was a partial floodlight failure.

With so many in the ground, the only decent thing the teams could do was to agree to play on. So, even though the fused lights were still not working, the game restarted in sepulchral gloom after a break of eight minutes.

Transvaal had been unhappy with the officiating of another West Country referee when they lost at Leicester, and last night Ashley Reay too had no trouble identifying South African transgressors even in the darkness.

Transvaal thereby found it hard to build any momentum and Bristol, although without the injured Martin Corry and their Welsh recruit Arwel Thomas playing sevens in Dubai, were regularly able to boot themselves in two decent attacking positions.

Not that they then did much with them, other than to turn to Mark Tainton, whose outside-half place has gone to Thomas, to kick penalties. This he did three times in the first half, whereas Joe Gillingham missed twice for Transvaal before succeeding at the third attempt.

There followed a third delay while the stricken Shaw received prolonged attention before being carried off on a stretcher and then taken away by ambulance. Last season a knee injury put him out of the World Cup.

Transvaal contained three of the Springboks who beat England - Mulder, Dalton and Wiese - but you would never have guessed until Japie Mulder's penetrative run set up a critical try for Lee Stewart. Gillingham's conversion was followed by a Tainton penalty and three by Gillingham, and Transvaal added a penalty try when Bristol did not retire at a penalty in front of their posts.

The South Africans would have reinforced their steadily growing superiority when Charles Rossouw peeled off a maul to touch down in the corner - but Reay had whistled at precisely the wrong moment to award a scrum to Transvaal.

Bristol: Penalties Tainton 4. Transvaal: Tries Stewart, penalty try. Conversions Gillingham 2. Penalties Gillingham 4.

Bristol: P Hull (capt); J Keyter, N Marval, D Wring, G Sharp; M Tainton, K Bracken; A Sharp, M Regan, D Hinkins, S Shaw (P Adams, 38), G Archer, C Barrow, E Rollitt, J Pearson.

TRANSVAAL: J Gillingham (Technikon); A Homan (Roodepoort), J Mulder, C Scholtz, J Louw; L van Rensburg (Rand Afrikaans University), J Adlam (Randfontein); C Campher (Wanderers), J Dalton, I Hattingh (Rand Afrikaans University), J Wiese (capt, Pirates), P van Westingh (Rand Afrikaans University), Charles Rossouw (Germiston), L Stewart (Roodepoort), D Kruger (Rand Afrikaans University). Replacement: P Hoffmann (RAU) for van Rensburg, 77.

Referee: A Reay (Frome).