Finally the sun shines

It was really good to be out on the pitch again and to finally have a dry pitch and the sun on our backs. We were expecting strong opposition from Olney after their showing at the Northampton Saints tournament, and they didn't disappoint. They brought enough players to field three strong teams and an army of coaches - all of whom were very friendly and shared our ethos of keeping things fun and relaxed. The net result being a very entertaining and enjoyable morning of mini rugby.

We adopted a different team rotation system so that all the coaches could see everyone play, something I wish I'd have thought of earlier in the season! Unsurprisingly, given that it'd been 4 weeks since we'd had even a training sessions, we all seemed a little rusty, it took the first team I watched until the second half to get into their stride. But hopefully the run out and stiff opposition will have banished the cobwebs and set us up nicely for the Bicester tournament next week.

Overall I feel we did well. There was good tagging in evidence, we were off-side less than the opposition and I thought our support play was good. However, ball handling did let us down a bit; too many dropped balls and worse still, too many easy passes ignored. The nature of U7s tag rugby is that you don’t win games through brilliant play, but you lose them by making silly mistakes. So we need to keep working on that decision making, passing and catching.

That said, I saw two tries scored as the result of long passes that cut out two players (top flight stuff) so who am I to stifle the imaginative and creative thinking of our players !!

Hmm, and just looking at the score sheets again, seems we did better at the beginning of the morning than the end. Perhaps we need to look again at fitness!

William, George, Lewi, Angus, Tolly
8-8, 6-4, 6-7

There was some determined and effective running as ever from the guys in this group - and there are pictures to prove it thanks to Tolly’s dad. I’ll see if I can work out how to upload them to the web site.

Pictures now found here : Olney match

Aaron, Joe, Aidan, Theo, Ethan, Henry
5-9, 8-9, 7-10

Despite the results sheet, the game I watched this team play was the best rugby I saw all morning - even the Olney coach thought we’d won it! There was excellent team work throughout the entire match, this will become much more important as we move up the age groups. The RFU regulations state “In Mini Tag Rugby, there is total emphasis on running with the ball, evasion, running in support of the ball carrier..”. I saw lots of excellent examples of all these skills from this team.

Alex, Thomas, Charlie, Thea, Jae, Jake
8-5, 5-5, 5-7

New boy Charlie has picked things up quickly, an impressive first game.