Back On Track Rossendale U10's

Sunday’s game was great fun and our first test after the home tournament, we had high hopes all that match play at the tournament would stand us in good stead for the game.

In the case of Burnley their team from last year grew enormously and they brought a staggering 22 players to Rossendale which was a good mix of boys and girls playing for this age group which is good to see. The Burnley coaches and the players were on very good form and were looking to have a fun day of rugby games. Given the size of both age group we decided to split the field and teams and run two games in parallel where we would have a team made up of more experienced mature rugby players from our age group and a more newcomer team, this is not an exact science but you can see the rationale…, enabling us to play matches fairly between the two sides of very mixed skills.

It’s not always possible to predict or plan the match day or opposition based on the fixtures, so we sometimes have to be dynamic on the day and make the best of the teams and the playing area.This approach seemed to work well on the day and both Rossendale teams were able to play both skill set teams from Burnley. The skill sets were fairly evenly matched on the day.

Results:
Rossendale 1st vs Burnley 1st - Ross 8 Burnley 1 (win)
Rossendale 2nd vs Burnley 2nd - Ross 5 Burnley 3 (win)
Rossendale 1st vs Burnley 2nd - Ross 12 Burnley 0 (win)
Rossendale 2nd vs Burnley 1st - Ross 2 Burnley 4 (loss)

As an aside – it was clear the importance of Rucking over in the games and special credit to the coaches for drilling this home early in the training season – having watched a couple of the matches this was very clearly and advantage and the source of a number of try scoring situations, furthermore the team identified this and said as much at the post match talk so it was excellent to see were happy to rip and take control of the situation where present to our advantage!
This is new to this year group and we are still early in the season so really rewarding to see from the coaching staff perspective and hopefully we can build on this with gaining tighter control of the defensive and attacking lines in the breakdowns 

Thanks Dave and Tim for refereeing – I appreciate this is no fun if the opposition can’t help out.