The U13’s headed off on the schlep down towards HQ this weekend, with the fourth of our Pool fixtures seeing us pitted against Harlequins, playing at St. Catherine’s University down in Teddington.

A special thanks to Will Field who chose to support his Datchworth team mates by coming down to play rugby with us instead of heading off to a previously arranged engagement. As it turned out that was particularly fortuitous as we lost George at the last minute to a sickness bug, so we only just managed to field a team with just 13 players available.

Straight out of the blocks, the Quins were quick to the breakdown, and won a lot of turnovers by driving us off the ball. This together with their strong (if somewhat early) scrummaging technique meant we were often on the back foot, and having to defend for too much of the first half. There were some brave hits going in from many of our lads, but ultimately the pressure told, and they exploited it well, particularly down the wing, and Harlequins went into the break 15-0 to the good.

After a good chat at the break, they boys started the second half well, but were soon down a couple more tries once again before finally putting on some pressure of their own. One particularly nice passage of play from deep saw us make some good ground through traffic up the field, followed by some nice ball spread down the line to an overlap on the left hand side, where Josh Bradley drew in the last of the defenders before popping the ball up to Spencer to take our first try of the morning.

Finally, in the last few moments of the game, after a number of scrum resets and then penalties awarded to Datch for persistent infringements by Harlequins, we were able to break free through William Field who charged through for our second of the morning, which saw us at least finish the game with a more respectable score line, albeit a 30-10 loss.

Nothing to be ashamed of today, with all the boys putting in 100%, and many fighting on through the tears of injury. It was a tough day at the office, and one the boys will learn from. Well done to Danny who took Player of the Week again this week, after putting in a strong showing both in defence and attack.