If you’re one who enjoys seeing interesting facial expressions on people, tell St. Mary’s players and coaches that Davenport has the best scrum in the country, and watch them wage internal battles to not reply.

The hard-tackling points machine Dylan Audsley.  Michael Geib photo

Davenport handled a tough Army team on the East Coast last week. Now it's the West Coast. Steve Zomberg photo.

The Gaels have a great deal of pride in their open field running, their ball movement, and in their physicality, but it starts and ends with the scrum.

Ryan Pratt, who is an unsung workhorse, Dino Waldren, who loves to make open-field runs, and Mike O’Neill, the leader from hooker, make up a front row that has enormous pride in their set piece.

“Against Utah we did OK in our set piece,” said O’Neill. “We lost two or three lineouts and we shouldn’t be gifting teams the ball in our set piece. But our scrum was good - it showed flashes. We are looking forward to facing Davenport. We know they will be really sound in the set piece.”

The much-anticipated DIA semifinal will lack one ingredient - Davenport captain Angus MacLellan is not expected to play as he has been with the USA Selects in South America. (BYU skipper Kyle Sumsion has flown back to play in the Varsity Cup final, and MacLellan is not named in the USA Selects 23, so maybe he’s on his way too.) If MacLellan is not available, that’s a blow to Davenport. But not a terrible one, as the Panthers have performed well without him in the past, including last week.

O’Neill said nothing bout that, and chose instead to focus on what Davenport does well, and what his team needs to do.

“Against Utah we had hoped to play a little bit better D, but we did well in pushing the pace of the game. We talked about how in previous games we were slowing it down and we needed to get after it. We haven’t played anyone from the Mid-South, and we know they will be really sound defensively.”

“We played a nice tempo,” added St. Mary’s Head Coach Tim O’Brien. “We moved the ball well, had nice angles. But most importantly we played very solid defense. Then we got very quiet at 28 minutes.”

O’Brien and his forwards coach John Everett spent the week focusing on perfecting their game, but they also kept an eye on who they were playing.

“I think we make some adjustments based on JP Eloff - supposed to be the best #10 in the country,” said O’Brien. “We have some talented guys. We’ll go after people. We’ll go after people in the scrums. We pose our own set of problems for them.”