Chill-out day yesterday to relax and prepare for today’s big game. After the morning training session Shiplake divided its time between the Beverly Hills-esque Franschhoek, where Piers Chen joined the tour dutifully dressed in his no 1s, and then Stellenboch.
Red-meat-heavy Team Meal in the evening.
Pre-game “prison” breakfast of cold scrambled eggs and wieners this morning. Character-building. Four members of the team in the dog house after shaving “try stripes” through their eyebrows and staff needing to search village shops for make-up to fill in the gaps. Could only find black eyeliner so one player looked convincingly like Bert from Sesame Street.
Excellent morning training session followed by lunch at the hostel of bobotie (curried meat and fruit dish not dissimilar to moussaka), pumpkin fritters and sweet apricots, with ice cream in a peanut sauce for dessert. Boys were perhaps a little perplexed by the flavours but the meal offered plenty of sugar/energy to be burned in the afternoon match.
A brilliant game ensued with a 17-31 win to Shiplake.
Team captain Jimmy Wright said: “Really pleased with the result. It was a great opportunity to use our backs and we used our size to dominate a smaller team. I’m particularly pleased with the set plays that went according to plan in the middle stint of the game.
“For the next match we’ll aim to improve our alertness in the first ten minutes of play but there were some outstanding performances from Max Nutman who really stepped up and defended well, George Davis had a blinder and Jack Madden made some cracking try-saving tackles.”
A well-earned team night out in Stellenbosch to celebrate the win.
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