U18 Friendly Wimbledon 12 - 30 Richmond 13th October

A game of two halves - and, from our perspective, 2 scrum-halves. I am afraid this will be a very short report indeed - the rain was coming down so hard that my notes are literally too soggy to read. Clearly we came out second-best from this one, but a surprising number of positives to take away. First of those was the start we made to the game, pressing Richmond back to their line and keeping them there for the first 5 minutes. Second was the commitment from the whole team and for the whole game to stopping the (huge) Richmond pack playing their pick-and-run game. Thirdly, the fact we won the second half 12-5 thanks to two great tries scored by James and Alfie - hence the two scrum halves.

Some great individual performances - good kicking from Cameron, Archie and Matt Shaw; great ball carrying by Connor, Rory and Chris and of course the try-scorers. Sam came within inches of escaping the last tackle on a couple of occasions. A particular mention to Rob Wilson who (unlike anyone else) agreed to play for the opposition and allow the game to go ahead. In the process he had a great game and did his selection prospects no harm at all. My apologies if I missed your champagne moment but I missed a lot of the game while dealing with injuries/physio and of course fetching the new £20 match ball from the undergrowth. Try to land your kicks just outside the line in future please :)

Some negatives of course, given that we lost, but overall I think this was a game we needed to play and will have learned a lot from. Bring on Farnham...

Martin