CNRU Round 1: Pirates beat Quirindi 47-15 to get season off to a winning start

There were some vintage moments from a couple of club stalwarts with Andrew Moodie and birthday boy Brendan Rixon both winding back the clock to find the tryline.

Skipper Conrad Starr and winger Sam Bowden, both also members of the '100-game club', also nabbed five-pointers, as the home side recovered from a bit of a shaky start to rack up a bonus point win.

"We were fairly rusty but it was a good first hit out," Starr said.

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"We knew Quirindi would throw everything at us and they certainly did."

"They got the jump on us early and we had to fight our way back."

After they "stuffed" their kick-off exit, they found themselves on the backfoot with Lions five-eighth Charles Gulliver nailing the ensuing penalty. Skipper Tom Grant then pushed his way over to make it 8-nil inside the first 10 minutes.

But Pirates got to work and, after Moodie split open the Lions defence and ran away almost 50m to score to put them in front, pulled away for a 26-8 half-time lead.

The five-eighth was a key architect of the fightback, and the win, moving the the Lions around like chess pieces with some searching and pin-point kicks.

"He's a genius, his kicking game is second to none," Starr said.

"We're really lucky he's still going around and going well."

As they are, he is.

There was some conjecture the inspirational No.8 might hang up the boots after battling injury for a lot of last season. At the same time there was a school of thought that an injury and COVID disrupted season wasn't the way he would want to finish.

"It's really about the body now, just how I feel," he said.

"I did some work with Garry Walsh and Jake Douglas after the season, just worked on a few things and body was feeling good so just decided we'll see how we'll go this year."

It wasn't all about the 'old boys' on Saturday with Josh Dransfield scoring on debut and Mitch Mack showing what a handy inclusion he is going to be for them.

"He's just a workhorse, he's fantastic in the middle there doing the hard yards," Starr said.

"He's only a young pup and he'll turn into a really good footy player if he keeps working on it."

Lions coach Ed Nankivell there was "a lot to like" about his sides' performance but also "a lot to improve on".

"There's plenty of good talent there, we've just got to play better as a team," he said.

They knew it was going to be a tough ask first up but were for periods able to really stick it to Pirates. But too many penalties and their inability to secure the ruck hurt them, Nankivell quoting the old adage that you can't win a game without the ball.

On the flip side he was really happy with the intent they showed early in the game and then again early in the second half.

"The start of both halves were good, we've just got to keep chipping away like that," he said.

He thought Sam Avard, Brodie Nankivell and Tom Grant were three of their best.

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