The Gannock was graced with the presence of the President of The Rugby Football Union, Derek Morgan, for this North Yorkshire derby and Malton at last found their best form to swamp Ripon 55-10.

The early exchanges were equal with the heavy Ripon forwards causing one or two problems for the home pack.

Malton's skill levels always looked much higher and in almost perfect conditions the extra class began to tell.

After 15 minutes a good Malton move sent centre Liam Cowton over for the first score.

The Malton pack were now beginning to make inroads which allowed the excellent back row to take on more attacking responsibility.

A series of drives by the home forwards set up a good position 30 metres out and fly-half Chris Creber fed rampaging No 8 James McKay, who burst through two tackles to score in the corner.

Unfortunately for Malton, McKay was then shown a yellow card by the referee and spent the mandatory ten minutes in the sin bin.

During this time Malton lost a little discipline and conceded a penalty try when they were adjudged to have collapsed a moving maul near to their line.

Scott McAra converted for Ripon and also added a penalty shortly afterwards to level.

No sooner had McKay returned when Malton were again reduced with full back Will Barber forced to sit out for ten minutes. Malton held out to half-time without further damage.

Back to full strength, Creber sensibly kept Ripon on the back foot with some very good line kicking as Malt took command.

The first of seven second-half tries came from a forward drive from which scrum-half Jon Newsome emerged from the bottom as the joyful scorer.

Ripon were struggling to keep up with the pace and scintillating rugby followed from Malt.

Creber grabbed two tries for himself to put the game out of Ripon's grasp. Further scores followed from McKay for his second, substitute Will Jones, Richard Webster and Neil Gilbertson, who had a very good return to first team rugby. Barber converted five of the tries.

Again, this was a total team performance but there were excellent performances from the back row of Richard Webster, McKay and Andy Mitchell and the line out work of Webster and Duncan Foster was almost faultless.

Although the personnel were almost identical, the threequarters were unrecognisable from the previous week's unit as they did everything at pace and kicked admirably from defence.

The win puts Malton into second place in the league and Saturday's game at West Park Bramhope will be the proverbial six pointer.

Updated: 08:36 Tuesday, October 08, 2002