The second game of the season for The Hague Barbarians (the clustered junior rugby team consisting of players from Wassenaar Warriors and Voorburgse Rugby Club) was played at Tilburg on Saturday 24th September against the Breburg cluster team.

The weather wasn’t the best for running rugby with heavy rain falling for the whole morning and conditions were going to be tough.

The objectives from the coaches this week was to play more of the first year players with a few second years in reserve for experience.

The game was full of knock-ons and spilled balls, mainly due to the weather and what we had expected. This was an opportunity to see The Barbarians scrum in action and it didn’t disappoint. In the first half The Barbarians won all of their scrums and stole a number of Breburgs as well. The Barbarians tried to play running rugby but some of the passes were a little hopeful instead of being accurate. With the rain still falling hard, the team tried throwing wild passes instead of taking the ball into contact and recycling ‘safely’. Still this was a good first half by the team with Matt McCoy, Jamie Wijnmalen, Daan Lorsheijd crossing the try line bringing the score to 0-27 at half time.

The second half saw a spirited performance from the Breburg team but couldn’t break through the Barbarians defence. The Barbarians continued the first half performance with tries coming from Plamen Brown, Jamie Luijkx, Lucas Aitken and Andre Langlois all scoring. Andres try coming from a beautifully weighted chip kick from Tijmen Pronk that Andre gathered at full speed, touching down under the posts.

Final Score Breburg 0 – The Hague Barbarians 49

Again a large score from The Barbarians which is a great result for the team. The game was full of positives for the team and the coaches – The support play by all of the team was great to see. The scrum functioned well again and the defence held strong. Conditions meant that we had a lot of handling errors but the team adapted well and we saw the errors being reduced as the game carried on. We lost a lot of ground as the structure in our rucks wasn’t good enough and line outs will be a focus of the next couple of training sessions as the timing of the jumper and the throw weren’t in sync.

But a strong second game from the team who are starting to click together. Played 2, won 2 and next week we’re back at Wassenaar for our third game against HRC 3!

Stephen Brown
Match reporter

Posted in General, Juniors

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