DAVID Hyde wishes he had known Oxfordshire were home and dry at Twickenham regardless of Sussex’s last-gasp try on Sunday.

The Henley Hawks No 8 could only watch on from the bench after he had been sin-binned in the 70th minute for not rolling away from a ruck.

Sussex went on to cross twice, including Ed Bowden’s score in the last play of the Bill Beaumont County Championship Division 3 final.

The drama led to a 29-29 draw and confusion, but the officials confirmed Oxon as the winners on tries scored.

Hyde, who forced his way over for Oxon’s fourth, said he was a relieved man, but wished he had realised the result was safe, regardless of the Sussex score, with a minute to go.

He said: “I’m not going to lie, I thought I’d cost us, but the ref said ‘roll away’ and I did my best to get out of it.

“When we were in their corner with 55 seconds left, we were thinking ‘we’ve done it, just hold it’.

“We were screaming at them on the sidelines ‘boys just hold it, just keep it simple, 55 seconds of man power, hit them as hard as you can’.

“But we like to play with a bit of flair and, to be fair, George (Primett) made a lovely breakthrough and the offload almost came off.

“When they got the ball they came back at us and scored a try and it was horribly tense.”

Hyde added: “To be honest, if we had known we were going to win on tries I wouldn’t have cared as much.

“I would have been sat there saying ‘we’re seven points up, even if they do score a try, we’re home and pretty, 55 seconds left, let’s get a beer’.

“But we didn’t know and it was all a little bit tense.”

Captain Allan Purchase was in a similar position.

When asked if he realised Oxon had won, he said: “Not really.

“They were saying on the sidelines we’d scored five and they only scored their fourth, so we were just trying to count up and work it out.

“We were saying ‘have we done it’, but it’s just brilliant.”

Only a handful of the Oxon squad had played at Twickenham before and it is an experience the players will never forget.

Hyde said: “It was relatively empty, a few hundred people, but even when you walk out you still feel like ‘oh my god, I’m playing at Twickenham’.

“If I was one of the England boys, you know what they feel like now, if there’s 80,000 people there screaming you can barely hear each other.

“Even for us, I was calling the lineouts and the hooker just couldn’t hear me and I was only 20 feet away.”