First game of the New Year: Hornets vs Eden U8's

Although the return to rugby after an extended Christmas break may have shown a bit of rust in certain areas, the overall standard of rugby was still very pleasing indeed.

More pleasing was the turnout; to get more than twenty players to the first game back was exceptional so as ever, many thanks to all the players and parents.

The games themselves were all keenly fought, high scoring affairs with clearly more emphasis on attack than defence; and although we won all three games, we will certainly need to work more on our defence if we are to continue to improve and challenge the better teams we come up against.

With such high scoring games, there were clearly a lot of good individual performances; too many to all get a mention. Congratulations to Connor Wade on being awarded the Player of the Week – his all-round performance and positive attitude towards his team being the reason he was chosen this week. He was pushed extremely close by Blake Airey who would easily have won Player of the Week on any other occasion, having scored more than 10 tries across the three games. His cousin Caleb Airey deserves a mention also for the dogged defensive display he put in, chasing down tags continuously – along with Coen Edwards and Alfie Tipping they were some of the more committed defenders that I saw. However; the highlight of the day for me was the try scored by arguably our shortest team member – Finlay Wood. Taking the ball from the centre, he dodged his way to the side-line before shrugging off two or three defenders as he sprinted down the wing to score in the corner – an excellent try.

Looking forward to seeing you all at Dallam this weekend to work more on the importance of defence!