U10s Tigers, Stags & Bulls do well at the Maidenhead tournament

Sunday 12th October 2003

In Pool A the Tigers came out strongly and beat Cleve in a very physical and close game, coming out 2-1 winners after a little confusion about the location of the dead ball line. Unfortunately the promising start faltered somewhat against Haslemere, where despite dominating possession the ball did not find its way down the line and ultimately neither team scored.

Next came the toughest game of the pool against Winchester, who looked comfortably the best team we have seen - and apparently are unbeaten in 2 years! The match was lost by 2 tries to 0 - though we did get over their line twice, only to see one score disallowed for not grounding the ball properly and one called back to award us a penalty! Winchester were a great team though, and on balance deserved to win the pool, as they did.

The Tigers bounced back to beat a powerful Drifters team comfortably, finally putting together some team-play and scoring some great tries, finishing runners up in the pool.

Try scorers for the Tigers were Luke Thomas, Leo Smith (2), Thomas Eckles (3) and Huw 'Mad Dog' Kmiot.

In Pool B, both Stags and Bulls played some great rugby. The Bulls, captained brilliantly by Edward Kaye, were the only team in the pool to score in every game they played, with great performances from Josh Edney, Matthew Smith, Ben Jepson and our flyer Ross on the wing amongst others.

The Stags finished runners up to Marlow, having won the same number of games but not scored as many tries, which was rough justice. Captained by Shiv Khindria, they saw great tries run in by Josh Spooner and Steven Carn amongst others. One of the coaches described the performance against Marlow as being worthy of Twickenham in terms of waves of attack and renewed pressure and recycling of the ball! We'll have more of that please!!!

All in all, a good day, with much promise for the future.