Valuable learnings despite losses

Spring finally arrived with a picturesque sun kissed lakeside setting and our favourite away location of this season for a tournament originally arranged for last October. The season has been full of stops and starts and we've enjoyed the hospitality and competition from Littleborough , games being strongly fought, food deliciously served and people unfailingly welcoming and sporting in nature.
This week brought together in addition to our familiar hosts, recent rivals Aldwinians plus Waterloo, Sefton and Rishtonians in a round robin league of 5 fixtures. We were missing captain Rowan but had a strong squad of 14 up for the challenge, albeit very short of recent match experience . The assembled crowd were already talking tactics for Windermere / Kendal in terms of keeping warm but most of the chatter was about the season " run in " with a lot of rugby to play this month starting with the 5 contests today.

Well, we didn't win , let's start there. However we did play some of our very best rugby of the season, individuals turned in their personal best achievements and progress, and we made it hard for the strongest teams - unfortunately we couldn't quite get everything firing in unison in any of the games which made for a slightly inconsistent overall showing and a set of unfamiliar reverses. Nonetheless , aside from the post lunch aberration reminiscent of tag tournaments past , the commitment and effort was there for all to see and it's my view that the results were perhaps not as important today, given the amount of game time experience against good opposition.

However, in brief, here's a canter through the games - around 10 minutes each way, today marked the birth of " Enty time " - starting with Aldwinians . We'd beaten them soundly in Feb but they had clearly chosen Weetabix over the tempting bacon aromas and they delivered a massively improved proposition - despite tiger ish tackling and determined combat, we were quickly 0-3 down, but we always score and it was a beauty too, Tyler Lusty finishing a strong run after good team play from Thomas Whittaker and Dan Stevens in the build up.
On to Littleborough, and an early 30 second lead courtesy of Jason Wilkinson before the Cheeky Try of the day from " sniffer " Jamie Boxall who had an excellent morning involved in many contests and tackles. Boro pulled a try back as things became a little scrappy but we hung on to win , always narrow margins between these teams.
However, this was the peak of our day, on to Rishtonians - if Aldwinians had Weetabix, I think this lot had added double helpings as one sturdily built chap steam rollered his way through in quick succession without much opposition from our smaller folk. Ieuan Bissell had other ideas though and in a feisty ( I think that's what one of the parents said to Andrew) show all day, he pulled back 2 excellent individual tries - more from Yi later - but the reverse was still 2-5.
Cue lunch - obviously it's a mistake to have any form of break or recreation - that's probably quite rash parental attitude and clearly over zealous and competitive - but it always b££&ers us up in these tournaments. Waterloo were next up , and we had a collective no show in this one - the good news was that we again broke the duck with Thomas Whittaker bursting through on a rare appearance to score a very pleasing effort, and so 1-4 brought our disconsolate troops in for one more game.
Now Sefton were running riot and toasting all comers, and so it was with some mild surprise when we were told that a win for us would secure a semi final place - in other words, nobody had been very consistent and it was all fairly even. Gary rallied our troops and so with determination we took to the field to give Sefton the proverbial run for their money. And we did. There was no story book ending here but the performance echoed everything said or written about this squad this year. Never say die, tough tackling, ( why not in the Rishtonians and Waterloo matches ???) bravery , support, some bad luck , disallowed scores, bit of scrapping but not enough on the day. A strong Sefton team finally overcame a tough rearguard effort by 2-4 with Yi capping an excellent all round display on the day with 2 more fine tries.

And so nothing to show apart from 5 games in the sun and lots of valuable experience - but there were plenty of smiles and plenty of people can be very pleased with their progress. We didn't make any awards on the day, the team were collective heroes and everyone p,ayed their part. Tune in next week to find who the eventual recognised heroes were but there's an added twist already to next weeks tale - its new RFU rules, Can you stand the excitement ?
I know you will be there ..........