On Saturday November 27th, 2021, our Turvens went to RC The Hookers to play against HRC, Hookers, WRC, and VR-C. Due to pandemic, bad weather, the new measurements against Covid-19 and some other reasons, only 12 Warriors and 2 coaches / refs were available that morning. All these brave Warriors formed 2 teams with no substitute. Clearly, we were not the only club who was facing this problem. The game schedule was changed 45 minutes before kick off. Some clubs had not received the new schedule yet; some clubs were not even present at the time of kick off. So all the teams ended up looking for available opponents themselves. At the end, our Team 1 only played 2 matches (with 1 hour apart).

Except for the messy situation, the players’ composition was very different from normal. Among these 12 Warriors, 3 were born in 2014; 7 were born in 2015; 2 were born in 2016. With no substitutes, everybody gave their 100% efforts and showed us what they could do. Our two youngest players both made their first tries. They had 4 wins and 1 loss at the end.

Team I: 9:5, 14:8.

Coach Gavin: “A very cool start to the morning in Hoek van Holland, but it didn’t take long to get our Warriors fired up. With a lot of the squad missing, we had no subs and we were extremely proud of the hardy 6 playing their hearts out without a break. Lots of great passing, supporting, tags, and running back to the correct positions at the restart are testament to the hard work each week in training. Despite the late scheduling confusion and only having 2 matches in the end, we secured 2 impressive wins in what ended up a cold and wet day on the pitch but lots of high spirits. Really well done.”

Indeed, all 6 players have concentrated for the two matches. During attacking, they never gave up any chances. In one instance, 3 of our players got tagged successively right in front of the try line and the 4th one finally got through. For defense, they showed amazing teamworks. 6 of them covered all the corners. Even if the opponent got through by luck, there was always another warrior waiting to pull his tag. Great job!

Team II: 10:7, 4:5, 8:6; 37 tags and 10 double tags were pulled.

Coach Pascal: “Team B played three games, but none of them against the scheduled opponents. We won two out of three games, the first one mostly relying on individual speed of 2nd years with no real passing and team play. Progressively the team got better organised, with some efforts to share the ball, move forward all together and pass quickly, with often one player as back up behind the ball holder so quite nice and well done. Despite the loss of the second match, I found this one and the last one better thanks to this team effort. They also started doing some “hidden passes” to trick the opponents, which worked quite well. Area of improvement: too many loose hands by the ball holders resulting in pushing opponents with the hand not holding the ball + too many players offside (including by fault of the ball holder moving back/left/right to cover all the field and try directly, therefore putting all his team offside). Apart from this, another good result and a very big up to the 6 who played with no pause and no substitutes.”

What a successful morning! However, due to the newest requirement against Covid-19, all the amateur sports activities have to been shut before 17:00. This means we cannot train on Thursday anymore. We still do not know whether there will be games on Saturday. I surely hope this will not be the last game report for this year.

Ying Zhou-Rameseder
Team Manager Turven

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