Sunday 15^th January 2012

Herts and Middlesex Division 6

Grasshoppers 76 Hammers 7

Not a good day for the under 13’s away at Grasshoppers, as this is a game the boys would like to forget very quickly.

The pattern of the match was set straight from the kick off by the Hammers team, when they allowed a Grasshoppers player to run untouched to score the first converted try. This was followed by six unanswered tries by Grasshoppers in the first half, due to no one in the Hammers side tackling the opposition. To rubbed salt into the wounds of the under 13’s, all but one of these tries was unconverted by the Grasshoppers fly-half to make the score 47 -0 at half time.

Some stern words from the coach and the players themselves seem to galvanise the Hammers team play in the second half as they began to tackled and create turnover ball, from which Alexandre Coyard manufactured a great try from open play, by running down the left hand touchline and evading several tackles from 60 metres out. Henry Collins converted to make the score 47-7. This try seemed to spur on the team, who now took the game to Grasshoppers for 15 minutes through Marc Plantenga, Raphael Fackler, Robert Power, Alexander Coward and Milo Storey who all played well in the second half. But in the end, the score gap was too large to recover from and Grasshoppers scored a few more tries to make the final score 76-7.

This was a harsh lesson for everyone in the team, that if they don’t make their tackles during the game they are not going to able to win any matches, whatever standard of team they come up against.