There is home training on the 3rd April….starting promptly at 10am The coaches will be planning the teams for final few festivals of the season so please could as many of you as possible come to this session?

If you have a player of the week trophy could you return it please?

Worthing Match Reports Warly Avengers (Paul and Dave)

Game 1 vs Worthing
The boys started a bit slowly and were a try down early after some strong running from one of their big lads, who then off-loaded well to one of their fliers. However the boys switched on and after a run of plays, Jonnie scored on the 7th and final tackle. We let 2 swift tries in, both following the same pattern as the first, so were behind at half time. After the break, we clicked into gear and began to run with more confidence, started passing the ball and looking to find space. Lucas K spotted Luke on the outside, gave a lovely pass and Luke hared off into the corner for a fine score. After a turnover near our line, we worked our way back up the pitch for Bear to power over after excellent interplay from the whole team. Immediately from the kick-off, we let one of their boys slice through our entire defence for a soft score, but then not to be outdone, we did exactly the same straight back at them with Jonnie grabbing the final try for us to pull it all back and end with a very honourable draw. Final score 4-4

Game 2 vs Crawley
Crawley had a couple of very big boys who they based their game around. We went one score down, but after some initial hesitation the whole team was getting stuck in and tackling these guys really well. Bear got our first after some determined driving, which carried him over the line. We were also running strongly and began to pass the ball and find space again. Ash was putting in some hard yards, Lukas W was jinking and pirouetting through the Crawley defence and then just before half time we put together a passing move that ended up with Luke getting the ball on the wing. He had a bit of room and his pace enable him to elude the defenders and score a great try. After the break, Lucas W showed speed and strength to score in the corner, while at the end of the game Jonnie floated a great pass to Luke, who again found the space and scored a very good try. Great team performance. Final score 4-2

Game 3 vs Bognor
Crawley was our best game and we could not quite match this performance again. We seemed to loose our concentration a bit in this game. Even though the tackling was good we could not quiet master the passing game and spent too much time just dying with the ball. We forgot our attacking heads and started to bunch up rather than spread out and let the ball do the work. We didn't get into our stride and then let in a few soft tries. Final score 0-3

Game 4 vs East Grinstead
This was EG's A team. Despite this, Ash got the first score after some solid work near their line. The opposition had some big fast boys, who in the end proved too much for us. We played well with some great tackles going in, but again could not quiet achieve the fluency we managed against Crawley. Final score 1-3

This was a much improved all round performance from last week. The tackling on the whole was good, though we do still need to go a bit lower at times. The passing was also much better, especially in the first two games, and we'll continue to work on that.

Worthing match reports Warly Rebels (Andrew)

Results were Worthing won 5-1, Pulborough won 5-4, Sutton And Epsom won 5-4, Chichester won 6-1 Brighton lost 4-3.

Firstly the kids really enjoyed it and all of them had stand out moments - and at times played some good team rugby passing and running with the ball!!!

Runner Up - brilliant effort. The team played really well, concentrated in the warm ups and were ready to play from the first whistle. Over all the tackling was very good, we also passed the ball to create the space for our quicker runners to take the scores. The first game against Worthing and the fourth game against Chichester demonstrated this in particular.

In defence they all worked well and all put in some great tackles especially Krish, Hayden, Edward and Conor, and we kept our "defensive line" well. Jonathan, Zain, Joseph and Leon also all made some great tackles.

Overall Krish and Hayden our big men in the middle of the field in attack took the ball forward sucking in defenders, this enabled our link men of Joseph, Jonathan and Edward time and space to find our flyers and finishers in Zain, Conor and Leon. Joseph and Jonathan both made good runs and looked to pass, Edward was very busy and ran with the ball really well. Zain and Conor both attacked well, Zain scored a couple of brilliant solo tries from the start using his pace. Leon when given time and space showed his speed and scored his tries well and was top try scorer by a mile! Although he scored the majority of the tries, many were started by the excellent work by the rest of the team in creating the space and time for him to show his skill and speed to beat the defence. A really great team effort well done.

I did not see the last game as I was reffing another game but playing back to back games at the end of the tournament against a very strong Brighton team (who were runners up in the Sussex tournament on try count back the week before) was a big ask but the boys did splendidly well and were very close so should be very proud of themselves because we are as coaches!!

They played some great rugby and scored some wonderful team tries - really well done.

Finally Leon should be given great praise for his job as skipper and communicating instructions from James.

Many thanks to the parents for your enthusiasm and support on a long day!

And a few words from James too:

All credit to the boys for a great day, and I was really pleased to be with them.
They should be proud of their performance. They worked really well as a team and focused on good tackling. The boys were brilliant in defence resulting in an overall 14 tries scored by the opposing team, compared to a brilliant 25 scored by us!

Huge thanks to Leon who was the captain of the team and did a great job helping out with communication to relay all my instructions to the boys.

Really proud to see Edward and Connor do some excellent tackles in most of the games. It wowed me to see Zane, Krish, Joseph, Jonathan, and Hayden working really hard in the centre of the pitch and making it much easier for Edward and Connor to score tries, including an excellent 12 from Leon.

A great day from all of the boys. Well done team!

Dates for your diary

3rd April - home training

10th April - Surrey A festival 1 team (please keep free if possible until Pete has made his team selection)

17th April - Surrey B (at Sutton & Epsom) (2 teams)

24th April - Surrey Dev (details TBC) (2 teams)

1st May - Minis Tour

8th May - Awards afternoon

Thanks everyone. Well done again to all of the boys! Don't forget to add photos to the FB page too.

Jane Hansen
U9 team admin

on behalf of Peter Jerrom
U9 Head Coach ad Minis’ Chairman