Home and Away this week!

Training At BRFC
With small numbers we had to be creative and worked on some essential skills of the game. Warm up was working on a small pitch where the guys could run and find a team mate to pass to with each set of 10 consecutive passes earning a point! This was a fun game focused on handling, awareness and movement to find a player in a better position. We moved up through progressions of this (netball, five step rule adding proper game elements at each stage) until we got to a game of touch. The boys were all fully engaged and desperate then to get into contact.

Drill 1, We focused on the key elements of the tackle (focus on the core, plant tackling shoulders foot between the ball carriers feet, into the tower of power position, cheek to cheek, ring of steel and drive). Using the meet and greet exercise of ball carrier meeting the tackler. The boys did brilliantly and were soon hitting the ball carrier hard. The ball carriers started to fall onto shoulders and keep the ball in two hands laying the ball back.

The second drill was a face off passing exercise where the boys passed the ball to down the line (opposite to a opposition player (tackler)) to each other until they are told go! The ball carrier runs back past their team mates, though a gate before sprinting to score a try, All the time with their opposition player chasing them to make a tackle. We had some great match ups and more brilliant efforts.

The Third drill was a rucking exercise lead by coach Steve (Reid). The guys in press up position had to jump into a sprint start position and drive through the tackle bag! Again there were some great hits with the guys understanding the benefit of starting lower and driving up into your opponent!

Finally we played an adapted game seeing some good rugby with the guys working well within their teams. The excellent work done leading up to a Game really told and it was a good game. Finally after more than 2 hrs pretty much non stop training Steve and I were worn out ?

Thankyou Alfie, Ben, Harry, Jack, Kyle, Mason, Reily and Sean. That was a brilliant session to be part of and all down to your enthusiasm and efforts.

Well done guys and see you next week!
Ross & Steve (R)

Reading Festival

It’s never ideal when we have to split our squad for a Sunday, but this week we were invited to enter one team into the Reading festival. We decided to go ahead with this, which meant we ran a training session at home and took a squad to Reading. For awhile it looked like we had one or two to many but with two sets of back to back matches the injury count mounted and we lost Harrison and Dylan Butcher for the last couple of games.

Overall it was a very good event for Bracknell, we played five tough teams, and came out on top in each one. However if their is one message we need all the boys to take away from this week, it is that WE CANNOT TALK TO THE REFEREE….. we found ourselves under a lot of pressure in the last two games as decision after decision went against us. It felt like I have said it a thousand times all ready this year, but if we get on the wrong side of a referee, we will inevitably have 50/50 decisions going against us. It is a minority of the team, but a consistent issue that we have to resolve.

We started in our usual form - that is half asleep - against a strong Newbury team. We lost our shape if defense and attack which meant we were exposed, and under pressure for much of the game. As the boys scrambled we managed to stay in the game, and exploited space with Tristan running in the only try of the game. (Won 1-0)

After a long break we found ourselves starting a run of two lots of back to back matches, with only a short break in between. Our second game was Maidenhead. The break had done the boys a little good, and we started to bring some shape into the match. Our natural aggressive tackling and rucking made sure we had the majority of the ball, and with a much better structure in our back line we opened up a scoring spree that saw Tristan, Theo, Tom (2) and Sam all run in tries. Two of these came from a strong pressing defense that opened up interception opportunities. (Won 5-0)

We only had a few minutes to recover from this before we took on a strong Reading side. By now the boys were starting to get into their stride and we dominated the game with string a straight running, and excellent support play to recycle quick ball. Tom scored three, and Jamie two in a 5 nil win. The physical nature of this game saw us lose both Dylan Butch and Harrison to injury - Harrison was just starting to settle in at fly half, but the rest of the squad managed to hold things together to finish strongly. (Won 5-0)

Our fourth match was against Reading Abbey. After taking an early lead we conceded our only try of the day. At 1-1 this game could have gone either way, however with strong runs from Tom and Dan we were able to put players into space, and the best example of this resulted in Charlie showing great hands to collect a pass and score in the corner. Tom also showed his strength to run 4 of the 5 tries in this match. (Won 5-1)

The final game was against Ensians, and we encountered our moist trouble with a referee all day. On multiple occasions we didn’t listen to the referee and had decisions turned over and went against us. On another day this will result in losing matches that we could win. However we managed to take chances, with a trademark run for Sam leading to one try, and Dylan Barry being on hand in a strong supporting role giving him three sores. (Won 4-0).

All in all the quality of our running rugby, and our ability to dominate the ruck, gave us five wins out of five. But we have to learn to respect the ref at all times……

Next week we are back to training— watch for updates

Steve E