Ifs, Buts and maybes……

Old Bristolians are fast becoming our bogey team. As mentioned last week, we’d have to be at our best to beat them and unfortunately a mixture of bad luck, bad attitude and bad tackling conspired against us yet again.

We lost the “tiny tornado”, arguably our biggest tackler, to an unfortunate set of events which involved him checking the small print on the bottom of Olly’s size 12’s!!! – However in the long run a pretty cool cut above the eye. Another good tackler, “Marmite Mac” (you either love him or you hate him – often at the same time!!!!), was trying way too hard to impress his entourage and all his major efforts were in vein as he gave away penalty after penalty therefore losing us possession and territory too often. Their first try scorer managed to skip through at least 5 players before he touched down and he wasn’t even travelling especially fast! And to cap it all, Ruben “the step” Mills was held up over the line after some fantastic footwork got him beyond the whitewash.

On the positive side, we drew 2 of the 4 sessions and only conceded 3 trys over 45mins of rugby. This was to a side that play a lot of rugby, and with 3 promising new recruits who were playing only their 2nd game ever!!!! Now when you put it like that, I think we can all be very proud of ourselves. At the start of the day I asked for tackling to be improved, and it was. All in all we lost 3-0 to a very good side and we weren’t anywhere near our best. They passed the ball and kept it alive very well indeed and therefore deserved the win, however on a different day I think we could have really pushed them close.

Special mention has to go out to Matt the Cat who’s tackling is fast becoming stuff of legend. There were also some notable hits from many others but we just need to do it more. If we tackle we’ll win games, I promise you. Otherwise it’s like playing football without a keeper, and that’s no good.

Finally I’d like to say how much general behaviour has improved; it’s still not perfect, but definitely improved. So, well done guys. A really important training session now on Sunday, actually our last before Christmas! With 7 tough matches to follow I’d like to see everybody there.