Quins rock up at Rugby Rocks

On a nice sunny Sunday and buoyed by the success of the Chiswick 7s Quins headed to Richmond for the social tournament of Rugby Rocks. There were some reservations about entering the social tournament, certain members thinking we should have gone into the open. Considering the level of player at the social I think we chose correctly.

At the start we had no clue of the standard we found ourselves first up against Guys Hospital, they looked pretty quick and strong. The opening encounter saw Quins take the lead, it didn't take long for Guys to hit back. The first match was lost.

Up next the strongest team in our group, they had won their first match 60-0. Just before the start the end of the first half Duncun Threadgould was tackled awkwardly and hobbled off, it has since turned out he has properly knackered his shoulder and will most likely miss most of the next season. they were just too strong and quick for us, though our scrum did hold up with one of them rocketing them backwards for a penalty as expected we lost this match as well 29-0 though some solace could be taken as it was their smallest margin of victory in the group.

Having lost 2 of our 3 group games we thought that we would be entered into the second tier Plate competition which we had some confidence about. the way the tournament worked however was that the top 4 seeded 3rd placed teams would qualify for the top Cup tournament. With one game left it was still possible to qualify, a fate not particularly craved by the team.

Our final group match was against how shall we say, rotund, vets. Or fat old men. Despite our pre game tactic of not scoring too many points, on the pitch however the team got carried away with some running rugby. A shout out to Kenny for scoring his first try in a Quins shirt, hopefully many more next season. We ran out eventual winners 54-0. This put our points difference to +10. Would it be bad enough to qualify for the plate.

NO! much to our disappointment we were seeded 1st out of the 3rd placed teams, into the Cup we go. Using Dunc as inspiration for our match against Kings College 1s we played the best rugby we had all tournament and ran out comfortable winners to qualify for the quarter finals.

After most matches teams were given an hour to recover before their next match. However after the match against Kings College we had only 10 minutes to get ourselves over to pitch to play our quarter final. We were up against an Edinburgh University exiles side. Playing some dogged rugby we were let down by our lack of fitness and showing signs of fatigue from the previous match, Edinburgh Uni were a good side that used that to their advantage and exposed the gaps and tired to defence to win and knock is out of the tournament.

Considering the strength of the opposition we did extremely well to reach the quarters of the Cup. The Plate was won by Kings College 2s so shows that we could have gone far had we not won our last group game by so much.

A big thanks goes out from the whole team to Dunc for organising the tournament and we hope your shoulder gets better.