Birth Certificates Please!

From The Westcombe Park website :-

What a great report - So good we named our site after it!!

WPRFC 0 – 62 Brentwood

The score pretty much says it all really. I’m not sure what it is with the U14’s. They seem to play together and really gel one week then the following week they aren’t even at the races. This early in the season, the U14’s are historically slow to get off the mark. Today, we’re not sure it if was it a case of too many larger shandies the night before, but the game looked lost before we had even kicked off. There was no urgency around the pitch and the pre match warm up was littered with lethargy. Brentwood were a big squad, not just the number of boys they brought along but their sheer physical mass dwarfed that of the Combe boys.

I haven’t seen that many pairs of hairy legs since my last arachnophobia evening class. We’re not bitter losers at Combe but birth certificates please!!
After the pre match briefing to our backs on the implications of ‘channel drift’ we chased the ball reasonably enthusiastically for the first 3 or 4 minutes. Phil Bunn getting a Brentwood stud in the face necessitated an immediate replacement. Combe sustained some serious pressure in this 1st quarter going into the 2nd quarter only 14 points down. Things weren’t lost at this stage, or so we thought. They say games are won and lost with the forwards. Today we won hardly any loose ball, lost a lot of our own scrums, lost virtually every line out and when we did win one of the previous three Brentwood where onto us so quick they nearly always won the ball back within 30 seconds. A major change from Bromley last week were it worked so well.

We ended the 2nd quarter 21 points to zero. This margin could have been much greater had it not been for a fine display from Fall Back Luke Maybank. He made two ‘last line of defence’ tackles to keep the score down.

Things didn’t get much better in the 3rd quarter. We did have our best break of the game with one of the centres coming close but a fine last minute Brentwood tackle enabled the ‘big lads’ time to get back and thwart our only real attack. A few more basic errors from Combe didn’t help. We kicked straight into touch too often and our restarts were far too deep which gave our chasing pack no chance of getting to the ball before Brentwood’s big guns had built up another head of steam and floored most of our lads on their way to more tries. Three quarters of the way through the game and we were 31 points to nil down.

In the 4th quarter, with Brentwood obviously getting tired (we wish) they secured another 31 unanswered points to end up worthy winners at 62 – 0. We are much better than the score suggests, albeit not today. If the boys want to progress to the next level and match teams like OE’s, Blackheath and indeed Brentwood they have got to get very serious with their coaching and discipline. No parent likes to stop the boys having fun, but if they turn up on a Sunday morning having had 5 hours sleep round their mates house the night before a game then they will inevitably be lacking stamina to last a full 80 minutes.

The positives from today: We still have a very large squad and the boys will take this beating on the chin and be better players next week. This has happened before and they have come back stronger and more resilient, nearly always ending the season with some silverware.

Action from the game..(click on pictures for full image)


Joel takes on the Westcombe defence

Chris practices his ballet step!