It didn’t start right. We were scheduled to meet Obayashigumi on Sunday, but since they were missing a few buddies to gather a basket-ball team, they withdrew from the competition on Thursday evening. But thanks to Koji and Yuji, we were able to find another opponent, as a matter of fact two opponents, Setagaya RFC and Fevers RFC, for a combined game: one half with each team.
Despite the tremendous party in Alex’s house the previous day, everybody was (almost) on time in Tatsumi Station. Weather was perfect, cloudy so not too hot, and the pitch there is top-quality. We had time to warm-up and practice line-outs, scrums and so on…
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We started against Setagaya. It was a tight game, but we mishandled some decisive balls, so every attack we tried to launch was ending with a fault. Setagaya played well and occupied our ground, they kicked a lot and were avoiding contacts to concentrate on their assets: speed and swift attacks. By the time we became dangerous, they had an head start of 10 points. Incidentally, that’s one good reason to come to trainings every week: to know your teammates so that you can play with them smoothly. We still have this problem of not getting into the game immediately, we still need a few minutes to come up with our best skills. I’m not happy with the second try when we didn’t tackle their dwarf-no8, a silly mistake. Anyway, we ended up losing the first game 10-0.
Pierre Le Bidois, taking his job as a coach very seriously, made a few changes during halftime.
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Second game was against Fevers. We played better and the opponent was weaker than the previous one. We were controlling the game an, on a ten-meters-line scrum, I had the honor of scoring the first try on a no8 run. Soon after, our wing Alex created chaos in the opposition lines by zigzaging all around, but he was tackled one meter before the try line. No one had managed to follow Alex the Comet but for Robin who picked up the ball and scored, converted later by Clement.
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Forwards were putting a strong pressure on Fevers’ pack and despite having Nike in front of us, we managed to overturn a few scrums by turning them. At the end, Fevers’ standoff ran like a mad man and scored a honorable try. The ref whistled the end right after the attempted conversion, 12-5 for AFRC.
If we except Clem’s injury, a harsh one, I think it was a good day for AFRC. Let’s try to keep the spirit for the following games.
Matt R.
(Photos and video by A. Suzuki)