Surprise match against Keynsham

It's all in the prep

Hi all,

I know I have not wrote a match report for a while but I believe that yesterday’s match against Keynsham deserves one and as we are not going to have a training session for 10 days I thought a bit of feedback would be good.

Not sure how I missed this match of the planner maybe the brain cells are fading already so I was a bit surprised when I turned up ready to run  a training session and a team form Keynsham were stood outside the club house wanting a match against us. Luckily the club sorted us a pitch/changing rooms and enough players had turned up so we could field a team.

Now to say a number of our team did not want to play a match and were expecting a “light training session” is an understatement, the warm up session did not really seem to make these players any more eager to play. However Keynsham seemed a lot more up for it and had obviously turned up to put a score on us and break our 100 % record. I will say at this moment that not all the players from our team were in this frame of mind. So our starting 15 took to the field with certain players missing and others stepping up to fill in the gaps.

To say the first couple of minutes of the match did not go in our favor is understating it a bit with a Keynsham player being fed the ball running direct towards our line, broke through 2 to 3 tackles (I use that term loosely) and promptly scored under the post’s which they duly converted. Now at this point to the coaches it felt like a cricket score was coming as the team appeared to have left their desire and rugby heads under their duvets memories of matches against BoA and Salisbury came flooding back and not in a nice way.

However I am not sure if it was the selected words from the coaches under the post’s or the fact that some of the players did not want to just lie down and be walked all over. But from the kick off the lads started playing the standard of rugby we had seen before Christmas. The Ref did not help with some of his decisions and some of the basic handling errors from our players flattered the other team, but putting these points to the side we were by far the better team for the remainder of the half our defense was solid and pressure was placed on their line. In attack we built a platform to build our attacks on and we moved the ball either through the forwards or the backs.  When we finally did not knock on or pass forward we really made the pressure count and scored a try and with the kick converted went into the break level.

As for the second half if I said we dominated the first half the second was only about one team. Even players who had really wanted to play came to life. Our forwards produced the best half of rugby we have seen for a few weeks, line outs, scrums and in the loose they really started to show they can beat any team out there. For once we had some back row moves and this resulted in a well worked try. As for the backs a special mention to both 10’s who controlled the game and fed forwards and backs with some intelligent unselfish play. To be honest all the back line played some great rugby both in defense and attack with some great interplay between backs and forwards. The score line does not really show how much we were in control (we squandered at least 3 tries) and the ref I think may have been slightly on the other side as he did quote to our team “I let it go as you are going to beat them anyway”.

In the end our fitness showed through, you were strong and intelligent in defense and used our strengths in attack. You did make mistakes but you never panicked, stuck to the game plan (for once) and dominated a team who are no push over. Final score 19 -7 (should have been more) now the key thing is to take what you did on Sunday and play that way for the remaining matches.

Next training session will be on the 18th April trepare for the match against Trowbridge.

Have a Happy Easter.

Graham and the Coaching team.