Trial Match

The u14 trial match was played at the Uni Junior Rugby Club home of McGillivray Oval against Cottesloe. Falling short of a number of players, their coach showed great spirit in allowing three of his boys to join us in both halves of the match to allow both sides to field the full complement of 15 players on the field. Nothing to be gained by giving a blow-by-blow account of proceedings so I will summarise that Cottesloe was the superior team by a good margin - demonstrating reasonable skills, good speed and creativity in the backs with able support from their forwards. By contrast, Uni was a bit slow off the line and the forwards did not offer consistent support in the tackle zone and ensuing rucks.

The positives were several and outweigh the negatives - notwithstanding a massive winning margin to Cott by the score. The only try to the Uni u14s was the culmination of half a dozen phases of solid, attacking play - the half dozen plus tries to Cott we mostly easy, due to lapses in Uni defence and admittedly some great individual running by the Cott boys. When the Uni boys set themselves to attack they made good progress until a turnover - due to weakness in support at the ruck - followed by the wonderful set of hands in the Uni backline. The ball handling and running skills of the Uni backline outshone the Cott backline and the Uni scoreline would have fared better if the backs had been delivered more clean ball.

Nevertheless, a great learning experience for the boys. We could not expect a better result since we only fielded 10 of our own, regular players - some of whom had not trained together for three weeks because many were absent from the training leading into Easter followed by the school holiday break of two weeks. Unfortunately, I missed the three day coaching clinic for regional trials because I was in Melbourne for a Software Engineering conference during the first week of the Easter break. On Wednesday I attended a referees orientation course at RugbyWA so it looks like I will join the ranks of whistle blowers during the first round next weekend.