Thames vs. Rochford U12s, 7 February 2010

Rochford got off to a flying start and pushed hard into the Thames half. Some deft ball handling by the team and a super individual effort by Jack, led to his first try of the match. After Rochford’s conversion Thames kicked off only to be quickly harassed by another strong Rochford surge and within minutes Rochford had scored again, this time with Will D touching down. However, from then on the match seemed to slow down somewhat.

Play moved more into a Forwards game and although Rochford seemed to win more of the scrums and the rucks than Thames, the team failed to capitalise on their initial show and the first half ended with just the two tries.

Someone had noticed during the first half that Thames had been playing with one man short so, in the spirit of the game, Connor was “volunteered” to switch sides for the second half. Would having a “friendly” in the enemy camp mean our boys would be unfairly advantaged we fair-spirited Rochford supporters wondered ?. We need not have worried ourselves on that score as the, up to now un-biased, referee seemed to have used the break to reinterpret some of the finer rules of the game and this was soon to lead to Rochford’s disadvantage.
As a result, despite some continued strong attacks by the Rochford team, the second half was spoiled somewhat by some rather over zealous penalisation of Rochford for supposed handing-off.

However, Rochford didn’t help themselves as they failed to capture their earlier performance and frustration over this repeated penalisation resulted in many of our boys trying to go it alone rather than passing the ball to better placed team members. Thus, although there were some interesting individual performances, no further score resulted and the game ended somewhat lamely.