Widnes Vikings 6, Huddersfield Giants 38

Mar 6 2004 By Chris Roberts, The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

The Giants' start may have been a little shaky as they were forced to concede a goalline drop-out after just two minutes and were fortunate to see Jules O'Neill shoot wide with a relatively easy penalty attempt.

But from the moment man-of-the-match March latched on to a loose ball following a dreadful misunderstanding between Andy Hay and Julian O'Neill and raced away to score under the posts after 12 minutes, there was going to be only one winner.

March added the first of his seven goals from eight attempts to notch a total points tally of 22 and the Giants were on their way.

By the 16th minute the lead was up to eight thanks to a penalty, and five minutes later it had been increased to 14, courtesy of a Gene special.

The Papua New Guinean may have been relatively subdued against Pia a week ago after suffering a badly broken nose during the early stages.

But he more than made up for his misfortune against the Vikings as he spotted a gap on halfway, raced through at lightning speed, bumped off a defender and then rounded full-back Paul Atcheson to score what was a truly magical try right by the posts.

Jules O'Neill briefly hit back with a Widnes try, which he also converted, in the 28th minute, but even at that stage few alarm bells were ringing inside the Giants camp.

Instead, the visitors increased the tempo and regained their 14-point advantage on the stroke of half-time as Reilly and Marcus St Hilaire combined from deep to hand Gene his second.

Even better was to follow within 25 seconds of the restart as March raced clear from deep before releasing Julian Bailey, who strolled almost effortlessly through several so-called attempted tackles. And this effectively signalled the end of the Widnes challenge.

The more the game progressed, the tighter the Giants defensive grip became, and apart from one long-range effort when Hefin O'Hare produced a bone-crunching tryscoring tackle on Bird, the Vikings never looked like scoring.

By contrast, Huddersfield created several more chances, but had to settle for two from March, after superb work from Eorl Crabtree, and a close-range effort from Chris Nero - his first for the club.

Any thoughts that the Giants would struggle without the likes of top injured trio Brandon Costin, Darren Turner and Jin Gannon could not have been more off the mark.