St Benedict’s ended their points drought in North One West by earning their first win of the season.

It was an outstanding effort too, to beat a Wilmslow side who had gone into the game as joint leaders.

And it was Wilmslow who opened the scoring with a quick-fire double to lead 14-0 early on.

The home forwards had been bolstered with the return of Michael Ramsden, while only skipper Steven Nelson and Stuart Wilson had been in the pack beaten by Firwood Waterloo.

Although they worked hard in defence, too many penalties allowed Wilmslow to stay on the front foot. Then, from a Wilmslow attack into the Benny’s half, a four-man overlap was undone as Steven Wood intercepted a pass just outside his own 22m line to outpace the Wilmslow defence to score wide out.

From another penalty, Wilmslow kicked to the corner, and from the line-out peeled round the front to score in the corner. With the last kick of the half Kurt Maudling kicked a penalty from 40 yards out to reduce the deficit to 19-8.

The second half proved mainly to be a wrestle in the middle of a heavy pitch. With 20 minutes to go the ball was moved out to Andrew Middleton, who had a clear run to the line to score. Maudling added the conversion.

With time running out Benedict’s pushed hard at the Wilmslow line, and scored in the final move of the match through Kristian Wood. The conversion was missed but it didn’t matter as Benny’s had won and were off the bottom.

In the Cumbria League, there is a three-way tie at the top of the table, even though one of them, Upper Eden, had their game at Millom postponed. Furness, who won 47-5 at Carlisle Crusaders are one, with Whitehaven in third.

Whitehaven, as predicted, had an extremely close battle with Silloth before coming out on top 24-19.

Haven try scorers were Luke Scott, Harrison Riley, Lee Jones, and Callum Tunstall.

After a stuttering start to the year, which included last gasp losses at both Whitehaven in the Cup and Windermere in the league, Egremont finally got their season up and running against Cocker-mouth at Bleach Green.

The home side did not have it all their own way; indeed, Cockermouth were right in the game at half time, having matched Egremont’s tally by scoring three tries of their own.

Fortunately for Egremont, full back Brad Jackson was on deadly accurate form with the boot and had converted all three tries, whereas the visitors did not manage a conversion, resulting in a 21-15 score line at the break.

Shortly after half time, Egremont convincingly took control of the game with two consecutive converted tries and this broke Cocker-mouth’s stubborn resistance.

Although the visitors managed one further unconverted try, Egremont were now playing with a free-running spirit which proved to be too much for Cockermouth to contain and two further home tries gave Egremont an impressive and thoroughly-deserved win by 47-20.

After a heavy opening-day loss at Upper Eden, Workington responded by beating Windermere 42-18.