Bs Beat Bedford

HRFC U13s | Match report

An early start on a damp, cold Sunday morning with a trek up the A1 was in store for the B squad selected for Bedford…but which club (Blues or Athletic?)…Pitchero had locations listed for both? Surely our super efficient team manger and administrator would not make a basic error like this so we of course blamed the app…why not, everybody else seems to!

So with only one player and coach confused and heading to the Blues (and being honest enough to admit it – Macka and Fraser take a bow) we all just about arrived in time for a Fraser warm-up and motivational speech from coach ‘clipboard Chris’.

With team positions sorted by the clipboard we kicked off. A fast start by Hertford and some strong team play had us 2 tries up quickly (Daniel & Sid) and we were feeling confident about the outcome. But Bedford were having none of it and quickly ran in 3 unanswered tries in response. The A players that Bedford had put into the team were starting to run the show and our tackling was atrocious; the excuse that their star player was the ‘son of Lomu’ was not accepted by Fraser in his rallying cry (even though it was a fair analogy, he even had the haircut!).

We needed to get back in the game and we did just that with some great all round team play – our forwards were winning the battle up front in both scrum and ruck and providing a sound platform for our half backs to quickly shift the ball to our creative back line.

Cue the appearance of Jack S making his debut for Hertford - and any rugby match for that matter. He fitted into the second row and got stuck in despite taking a fearsome blow to the conk early into his debut, which he quickly shrugged off!

All the work in training seemed to be paying off as we found space on the wings with some solid phased play, rucks, pick and go’s and releasing the backs to draw in defenders and shift the ball wide. We ran in 3 more tries before half time (Sonny x2 & Daniel) to take back the lead. But Bedford were still proving to be a threat with their dangerous, powerful strike runners and scored again to leave them 1 try behind.

The second half started well again for Hertford quickly scoring 2 good tries (Tommy N & Malachy) - surely this was enough to demoralise the opposition but they were having none of it.

“Son of Lomu’ was again making deep runs into our territory and looking to add more tries to the Bedford score line until William (first game at full back) and Sonny decided to take action. At one point we thought William was going to be trampled like Catt but he was made of stronger stuff and put in two superb last man try-saving tackles, before Sonny had seen enough and put in a cruncher that saw ‘son of Lomu’ leave the pitch.

We took control and looked after the ball and ran in 3 more tries (Sonny, William, Daniel) before Callum smashed through their defence and finished the game off with a showboating dive Chris Ashton would be proud of. We were the superior team and convincing winners having outplayed them in all departments.

Like at Westcliff we showed superb team spirit putting things that were not going well for us on the pitch right by taking positive action… but most importantly it was a team win, with all 15 in the squad making notable contributions to an outstanding overall performance.

The coaches and parents of both sides were complementary of the way the game was played. Definitely worth getting up early for!

Well done to all!

Andy Medcalf