Manildra take down Cargo in Woodbridge Cup league tag opener

Taking on a depleted Cargo squad, the Rhinos put 60 points on the board while holding the Blue Heelers scoreless.

This is the first year Rhinos coach Melissa Gibson has been in charge of a senior women's football side and admitted she was nervous prior to the game.

"It was a little bit scary to start off with. Luke (Petrie), our coach for the first grade, he's been fabulous and has given our girls a lot of time in pre-season training," she said.

"We've had a couple of girls who had previously played for us come back and they have heaps of experience so that's been sensational.

"We're just happy that we've got a nice group of girls together that can hopefully gel well throughout the season and we'll be able to get a few wins."

Despite the sensational start to the season for the Rhinos, Gibson was quick to temper expectations.

"We'd love to be in the finals, everyone would love that," she said.

"But we're not going to set our goals too high and we'll just go week to week."

Gibson praised the performances of Cusack - who scored four tries - and Hoswell who crossed the line twice and kicked and kicked too many goals to count during the game.

But what impressed the coach more than individual performances was the way the side gelled as a unit.

"I was really happy with the girls. We had set plays and we've been working a lot on our structure the last three or four weeks. They all went out there confident and came back happy, which makes me happy," she said.

"Hopefully we can get a few more wins on the park and get some more gameplay so we can try and run our set plays a little bit more."

This coming weekend, the Rhinos will travel down to Oberon to taken on one of the three newcomers to the competition who made the move from the Mid-West Cup this year.

"We've never played the three news teams, we've never come up against them in any shape or form. We play Oberon at Oberon this week and I expect that to be hard," Gibson said

"It's good for the competition that we've got more teams in. When we had our meeting with Woodbridge, everyone within the competition was happy to welcome them, so I think it's a good thing for rugby league in the area."

The other games in the round finished: Orange United 32 - Peak Hill 8, Eugowra 6 - Oberon 36, Grenfell 4 - CSU 22, Condobolin 46 - Trundle 4, Molong 14 - Canowindra 26.

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