U19 Rugby 7's

Ilunga winning the lineout

On Saturday 25 February Amano took an U19 rugby team to go play Rugby 7's at Simba International School.
 

We played our first game against a local district school - Masaiti Secondary School. We were a bit unprepared for that game and so we were met with quite a fierce opponent. Yarel collected a hard knock on his head, and we were rather disappointed to have lost one of our faster players. We did not have a rhythm or proper ‘output’ of our game plan yet. So we lost that game 14-7.

Captain Philip off loading in the tackle

In our second game,  against another local school Temweni, we were a bit more mentally prepared. We played with a lot more aggression and were able to score two tries. But our defence was not yet what it was supposed to be and hence they scored a try. We won that game 14-5. In our third game, we were really well prepared and we got our defence sorted out, but our passing really slacked off and we struggled to gain any possession. This was against Chiwala Secondary School. They had some ‘experienced’ players, and rather big ones, but we didn’t let that take the best of us. We drew that game 7-7.

Our last game in our pool was Trident College. There was really a tense atmosphere among our two teams, and we struggled to get the game running smoothly. This was rather frustrating and so we lost a bit of focus in our game plan and they found our gaps and made good use of them. We lost that game 14-0.

Musonda escaping Tridents' winger

We still made it into third place in our pool. Chifubu School was our final obstacle to overcome, however we had a harder struggle getting the game going, due to the fact that we couldn’t find a ball and when we did, we kept losing it [over a fence] and had to find a new one. When half time came, we were already a few minutes late and therefore we didn’t play to full time, which gave us little time to do anything. They had us rather confused and some interesting ‘drop kicks’ from the other team really put us in the gutter. We ended up losing that game 12-7. We came 6^th overall from 10 schools. 

I want to thank all the guys in the team for their support, courage and fighting spirits to keep on going. Mr Grove for assembling the guys and having coached us this far and God for the good fun and great weather we had. Thank you.

Report by P. Nieuwoudt