Those of you with a soft spot for the front row club, brace yourself for this tale, it’s a good one.
With time up on the clock, and the Eastern-Northern Barbarians’ season on the line at 38-38 in the Southland premier club rugby fixture against Star at Gore, the Barbarians were awarded a penalty.
With regular goal-kicker Caleb Young missing on Saturday, tighthead prop James Matheson called for the kicking tee with firm conviction.
Matheson made no mistake slotting the ball between the uprights to lock in a 41-38 victory and keep Barbarians’ playoff hopes well and truly alive.
The tighthead prop kicked 11 points and scored a try for a 16-point haul, but the front row fairy tale on Saturday was not restricted to Matheson’s goal-kicking deeds.
Loosehead prop Billy Christie was not to be outdone.
The Barbarians scored six tries in total and Christie remarkably crossed for three of them.
Christie combined with his propping partner Matheson to score 31 of the Barbarians’ 41 points.
"They were certainly dining out on it [on Saturday night], and so they should have been," Barbarians coach Sean Hurley said.
"It’s not often a prop scores a hat-trick and the other prop beats him [in the scoring]."
Hurley described the win as gutsy and was proud of his players considering just putting together a team on Saturday proved a major challenge.
Injury problems meant Barbarians had the bare 15 players to work with on Saturday, and two forwards playing in the backline.
Reserve hooker Garth Deveroux and Brenton Howden, who was supposed to start at lock, teamed up in the midfield.
"[Star] went up 7-nil after about two minutes and I thought the worst. I thought we could be in for a long day at the office," Hurley said.
But instead, the Barbarians were able to dig deep to book their first bonus-point win of the season.
They also did it with just 14 players for close to half of the game.
Halfback Willie Short was shown a yellow card late in the first half. He then picked up another yellow card early in the second half which meant it automatically turned into a red card and his day was done.
With Star down 38-26 with about 10 minutes to play, it was able to score two late tries, the second on the back of a nice Mana Harrison run, to level it up at 38-38.
However, soon after Matheson was provided his moment in the sunshine.
The victory means the Barbarians now trails fourth-placed Pirates-Old Boys by just two competition points.
Pirates-Old Boys missed a golden opportunity on Saturday to topple Woodlands at Surrey Park.
Woodlands opened the scoring through a Nico Costa penalty before Pirates-Old Boys scored two tries to go up 12-3. Costa kicked a second penalty to bring it back to 12-6 at halftime and converted try in the second half ensured Woodlands took a tight 13-12 victory.
Woodlands remains in second spot, after competition leader Marist posted a 30-22 victory over Blues on Saturday.
There was plenty of interest in how Marist would fare without Scott Eade running the ship at first five-eighth. The Marist captain was sidelined with a haematoma.
However, Jeremy Boyle slotted into the pivot position and was more than up to the job, guiding his team to a win.
- Logan Savory