Nottingham took two points from their first home Championship match for over two months but it should have been more. Trailing by five points at the break after playing into the wind in the first half, the Archers dominated territory in the second period. Having allowed London Scottish to extend their lead soon after the restart, Nottingham fought back to take a narrow lead, however the visitors also scored with their only other meaningful attack of the half and played intelligently to see out the victory.

Marcus Ramage made his first start of the season, after coming off the bench last week in the heavy defeat at Ealing following a long injury layoff, and put in a player of the match performance. While frustrated with the result, he also saw positives in the performance: “I’m bitterly disappointed that we lost. For large parts of the game we did really well but there were just a couple of slip-ups. We didn’t capitalise when we really needed to, especially when we were in the score zone, or at least in their half. Hopefully we can take a bit of momentum from it, particularly after last week’s result; so it’s much improved but more to go.”

There were a couple of enterprising runs from Ramage that nearly created scoring opportunities for his side in the opening ten minutes. However, approaching the quarter hour mark, after Ryan Olowofela gave away a penalty for not rolling away on his own five metre line, Scottish piled the pressure onto Nottingham and Will Trenholm provided the final pick and go to register the first try of the night. Tom Wilstead didn’t quite account correctly for the wind with his conversion attempt but it was the only kick of the night that was missed.

It was the same again for the Exiles four minutes later, but it was a penalty for taking out the man of the lineout that set up the attack, and hooker Nathan Jibulu dotted down at the centre of the rolling maul.

Just when it looked like the visitors would further extend their lead a brilliant interception and mazy run out of defence by Ramage averted the danger. The winger was making a habit of creating something from nothing and on 25 minutes he broke free on the right and cut inside to score under the posts.

Nottingham’s forwards were starting to dominate the set piece. After Nathan Tweedy left the field with a head injury with just less than five minutes remaining in the half the game was restarted with a scrum just outside Scottish 22. The ball was played back to Gwyn Parks who chipped through for Olowofela to run on to and score. Matthew Arden put the Archers into the lead for the first time.

It was short-lived, however, as the Exiles struck back immediately with Will Brown getting free on the right wing to offload the ball to Dan Nutton to run it in, making the half-time score Nottingham 14-19 London Scottish.

Within five minutes of the restart Roma Zheng received a Nottingham clearing kick on halfway but broke through the Archers defence. While he was stopped just shy of the try line, he managed to find Bryn Bradley to put Scottish further ahead.

Nottingham struck back, though, as yet another Ramage line break set up good field position for the hosts and James Cherry was the ultimate beneficiary as his outstretched arm got the try.

The Archers got a further boost when Zach Carr collapsed the Nottingham maul and received a yellow card for his efforts. From the restart wide on the left the ball was moved through the hands to Harry Graham, who just about avoided colliding with the right hand upright as he crossed the try line, with Arden putting Nottingham in front for the second time.

Craig Hammond’s men needed to make more of the period where they had the numerical advantage and they were ultimately made to pay for not doing so. As the game entered its final ten minutes, the Exiles made an incursion into home territory for the first time since their try early in the half. They found a gap and Jonah Holmes bounced his way over the line to put the visitors back in front.

London Scottish then imposed their tempo on proceedings and carefully managed possession to record their first win since the end of January.