Great first League result - Stortford 4s hit the ground running.

Match report September 29th 2013
Old Tottonians 3 : Bishops Stortford 4s 59

After our stuttering start to the season we travelled down to Enfield to Old Totts for our first effective game of the season following a game to be replayed and a cancellation from the opposition. We arrived with a full complement and even 3 subs unlike Thursday when we had 12 players available. A sincere thanks to those who did play.

Partly due to a few late arrivals at the meet time, we all left except for Aaron who had been busy finishing a bag of crisps at Stortford. I got to Old Totts and had that sinking feeling we had left our kit at Stortford. Old Tots looked like coming up trumps with a ‘bumble bee yellow’ kit, before Aaron strolled calmly through the doors asking “why are you wearing those shirts?” before amusedly placing our kit bag on the floor… 25 mins to go and we had finally got out there in the end.
Our warm up was quite short, and involved a few last minute changes, and the mood was perhaps a little too jovial just before kick off…. Off we went, and for the first 25-30 minutes we played some pretty poor rugby, the lowlights including them running their ball from their own tryline and creating a 3 man overlap (despite being 2 players down!); and only being able to convert any pressure into 3 points. At 30 minutes or so, the score stood at 3 apiece, with us constantly moaning about their foul play, hand in the ruck – the usual complaints when things aren’t going well.

Mark Rogers maintains the change was entirely down to him, and he was involved…. After a lot of very scrappy play, and some awful passing (welcome back..) a running play towards the top right corner saw Aaron throw a pass to the touchline to Mark, who very neatly popped it back in to a player who essentially had to fall over the line. Following the first pretty poor rugby, we now started to play the basics much much better. We started hitting rucks properly and clearing quick ball, which allowed the forwards to attack in pods, and the backs to start to use their running, stepping, jinking flair and the score soon started to rack up.

The game was essentially one way traffic from this point, but the highlights of tries scored involved Kiffy taking the ball from the 22 and his body thinking it could get there before his legs, literally falling 2 foot short of the line, fortunately the length of his arm to score by reaching out at full arms length. Annoyingly, Browney had a great game once he stopped moaning, and following lots of good distribution and excellent management of the pack started running through gaps in the back line to finish with 2 tries. Lippi settled in and then played a superb territorial game, scored a brace and converted the vast majority of our tries. Gus who was playing on a monumental 1 hours sleep had a fantastic game making innumerable holes in their defence, scoring 1 try, and helping form a rock solid defence in the midfield with Kiffy (stopping the earlier mentioned 3 man overlap). Possibly the most watchable try was Chris James who popped out the back of a maul and ran up the field, skipped around the full back, then looking over his shoulder to watch everyone standing still started almost stopping, finally delicately placing the ball down not sure if he had scored. One maul from a lineout halfway inside our 22 travelled up to the halfway line – a superb effort of organisation and communication.
The final score was 3-59 to us.

Whilst Old Totts perhaps didn’t provide the youngest and most structured team we will play against, it was a great game to build confidence, and making sure we did the basics of clearing out rucks (increasingly well), (eventually) good clean passing, but always supported play and looking to keep hold of the ball. A great start to the season, in which the forwards provided a superb platform to allow the backs to cause havoc, with some superb play from all players in the team.

Chris.