'Fatty's' have an enjoyable trundle at Aston Old Edwardians

Match Report c/o Mr. Phil Damms

With a sense of great trepidation, I approach the revival of a long thought dead beast. A once great institution now lying dormant, forgotten by the masses. Rising like a phoenix in a blaze of glory, I give you all a Camp Hill 3rd team match report!

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that fat blokes with nothing to do on a Saturday tend to play rugby. That statement has never been as true as when Camp Hill RFC 3rd XV turned up with 16 players to face our oldest rivals, Aston Old Edwardians, on a cold Saturday afternoon in January.

You know it’s going to be a tough day at the office when the team sheet has dropped from 18 names to 16 in three days. It becomes a much tougher day at the office when those 16 names include 14 forwards, 6 of whom are front row! How wrong was I?

Despite a lacklustre warm up, consisting mainly of forwards discussing the multiple ways to use our one lineout option, the ‘backs’ (more on that later) running some lines and a few minutes of touch, the boys all agreed on a game plan and approached kick off knowing exactly what we needed to do.

The game was physical from start to finish but it was clear for all to see that Camps had the upper hand in any form of exchange between the pack. You would think that a back line made up of forwards would struggle but it’s amazing what these boys managed to string together. With Kimbo at 10, Bruno at 12 and Tadpole at 13, anybody would be forgiven for assuming that these boys would just stuff the ball up their jumpers and try to punch the ball through the opposition however they used the platform given by the forwards superbly, getting the ball out wide, running very attacking lines and cutting holes in the defence like Russell cuts Spam for his sandwiches.

I wish I could give you all a detailed description of every try, but when you run 8 scores in over the course of 80 minutes, it becomes a little difficult to distinguish one from the next. Tries came from Elliott Price (2), Kimbo (2), Wardy, Rich Carter, Jordon Finn and Will Marshall-Murray. It was a physical encounter from start to finish but the game was played in the right spirit by both sides and I’m sure we would be more than happy for Aston Old Eds to come and visit us for a repeat fixture. To quote 3rd team skipper Russell Baker ‘It was like watching comedy porn, parts of it were funny but it was mostly exciting’ I am currently in the process of totalling up the combined weight of our finishing XV but I can put a decent amount of money on it being the heaviest team that Camp Hill RFC has ever fielded.

Final score Aston Old Edwardians RFC 2nd XV 24 - 46 Camp Hill RFC 3rd XV

I’m not a wine drinker so in lieu of Wine of the Week, I’ll give you Beer of the Week, Salopian’s Shropshire Gold, a 3.8% golden English bitter with citrus notes.