A Rough Day at the Office

This past Saturday, June 14, saw our Uppsala men's team team trek down to Erikslund for their second away game of the season. Something felt a bit off from the beginning, it may have been a lack of focus…..or maybe we caught summertime fever.

The game started with Uppsala kicking deep into the Erikslund back line, with great chase from Flankers Hampus and Jack. There was quite a lot of back and forth from both teams during the first ten minutes, where stupid ball handling and positional mistakes allowed Erikslund to notch their first try of the day. Not to be defeated, our back line fired back with quick passes and a long try for our captain James. Keeping with the theme, Erikslund bounced back with two more tries in the first half. We continued to turn the ball over, many knock ons and penalties, until our captain was once again able to make his mark with another sprinting try. Going into halftime, the score was 3 tries to 2.

The day was hot and the sun was glaring, it was obvious that the weather conditions and the lack of focus were weighing on the entire team. After a rousing speech from our coach and captains, we took the field with our heads held high. The second half started, and it was obvious that the heat was taking a toll on the forwards. Erikslund scored once from the try line, so our coach made some calculated substitutions, but it was far too late. The new forward substitutions fixed our scum problems that plagued us during the first half, we started to dominate in the scrums and we saw a touch of hope. Unfortunately our structure fell apart, pods mixing and players making questionable passes. Erikslund began to score at will, taking their total to 39 points and earned them a big win.

We now have two weeks to train and regroup, we have the weapons and skill to take down any team in Sweden….when we remember our structure. We can look back at our first 3 games and analyze what we do well, we can look back on our fourth game as a reminder that we cannot afford to lose our structure if we want to take home the gold this year.

We play one of the newer clubs to our league, Attila RFC, at home on June 28th.
Come down and see for yourself that we are taking this loss on the chin, and see if we can turn things around.

Cheers,

Nathan Ours