Bracknell U14s v Ruislip U14s

With half of the team at Chobham, we took 14 to Ruislip . We were completely asleep from the kick-off, and found ourselves 14-0 down. We pulled ourselves together to set Matteo loose for a try down the right wing which Henry converted, and then almost repeated the move but Matteo just failed to ground the ball one handed. But we bounced back and ran a move across the pitch for Scott to score in the left corner, 14-12. Ruislip finished the first half with a drive to score under the posts, giving them 21-12 at half time.

The second half was going to be tough as we were playing uphill, but Ruislip changed their sub from the fly half to their 6ft tall centre who we had struggled to contain in the first half. From their kick-off, we fed the ball via a great offload from Thomas to set Scott off to score, Henry converted again for 21-19, game on. Our supersub centre then scored against his own team with Henry converting for 21-26 to us, before they got one back for 26-26 (almost as exciting as England v Scotland last weekend!).

The game ended with Ruislip taking advantage of our tiring legs and scoring two more tries to stretch into a 38-26 lead, but a real testament to our stamina and commitment was that we chased down the final restart, recycled the ball and Thomas scored to end the match 38-31 to Ruislip. A good result considering our injury list, lack of subs, and we had several players in new combinations. We weren't quite aggressive enough in contact, and were pushed off several rucks, and we had too many handling errors which cost us dearly - need to work on these areas.
by Phil Wells