Between Covid cases and Mothering Sunday trips away we were worried that we wouldn’t make this weekends fixture, but we managed to get together a team of 8 and Barnard Castle loaned some players to make sure it went ahead.

Both sides were well matched and an excellent game of rugby was played. We finally managed to get a training session in this Wednesday and the benefit really showed.

In defence we were strong and starting to show a good defensive line moving up together and closing down attacking options. Tackling is really coming on, there was still a bit of ‘tickling’, but each individual player showed improvement. Tackles are now consistently becoming low and confident. On Wednesday, we worked on man marking and avoiding clumping round the ball. ‘Spread out’ may have been called out a few times…but again there is clear improvement. Barney had some excellent attacking runners and I think it’s fair to say the work we’ve put in prevented a lot a line breaks and tries.

In attack, we are also showing improvement week on week too. This weekend we started to employ some basic tactics to work as a team to score, rather than always going for the individual effort. The idea was to send strong runners down the middle to draw defenders and create space for our fast runners to break into. We also started to identify a player as scrum half for different plays to avoid everyone scrambling for the ball. On the whole the plan worked well and led to numerous tries. The team are beginning to learn that it’s not how many tries I score, but how many we score! Credit to Barney who tackled and defended well, but our focus on looking after the ball and creating space helped us break through.

Thanks as always to Barney for hosting us and reffing a free flowing game, and special thanks this week to all the rugby Mams for supporting our team and players week in week out.