The long trip down to Warrington often fills you with a sense of impending doom. They are a very strong club, with a superb history of wins at all age groups, well drilled, well organised and extremely well supported. Today was no exception, and the hour before we kicked off was filled with multiple coaches running through drills and practices which many a senior team would be jealous of. They had 18 boys who were keen to make amends for our last meeting, were we didn't make too bad of job of keeping them to a draw.
By kick off we had scrubbed up fairly well, with 10 on our team, including William, on his second outing for our club. Yours truly was asked to ref, and, sure enough, Warrington were out for blood, charging up and putting us on the back foot from the first second. This became the theme of the day, with even our fastest and stongest runners being forced to run backwards before being tagged by support runners coming through the middle. In our first game we were 7 tagged at least twice and put under pressure forcing knock-on and other mistakes we usually make other teams make. On the attack they went straight at us, running hard and fast and breaking our line, while our attacks started well but seemed to literally stuttered and stopped far too quickly.
In the end, we were not too far behind with either of our games and everyone had a good run out and made a pretty good fist of things. We all felt a little dissapointed with our performance which was a little flat for us but this gives us a few things to work on for next week, when we face Ormskirk (away again). We could learn a lot from Warrington and hopefully by the time they come to play us, on a full sized pitch with room for our speed to take hold, we can give them a better game.