The Under 7’s and Under 8’s have both enjoyed successful starts to the season, in particular at the Richmond Development Festival.
London Scottish Under 8’s
Team Manager; Alistair Gay
LSFC U8s got their season off to a flying start at the Richmond Development Festival at the weekend, with four wins from four. This was their first festival outing of the year, but it was clear that they had picked up from where they left off at the end of last season when several of the team had won their age group at the Pencoed tournament on our end of season tour. Handling was superb throughout the team, as was their well-coordinated defence. Despite rolling subs and a number of new faces in the squad, their sense of teamwork was apparent for all to see.
Special mention goes to Will Pinney and CJ for what must have been one of the tries of the day, with Will jinking past a few defenders when running the ball out from the LSFC line, before popping a great inside pass to C J who broke clear to score from halfway. Well done Eva, Rory, Will Malcolm, Vinay, Hugo, Phillip, Jesse, Will Pinney, C J, Ethan, Felix, Jack, Maria and Monty.
London Scottish Under 7’s – two teams
Team Managers; Chris Pinney and James Bishop
London Scottish 'Team 1' really enjoyed the festival on Sunday. We had a really good turnout and so were actually able to effectively field two teams! Our first game against Richmond summed up how everyone really worked together: Henry, Adrien, Magnus and Liam scored the same number of tries in the first half as Frank, Sam, Aidan and Eddie did in the second half. That meant that we comfortably won our first game. Adrien and Frank ran brilliantly in aiming for space and Henry and Liam worked tirelessly in defence to tag the other side.
Next up were Drifters. They were a good side and ran us close, but again our squad rotation paid dividends and we won what was a very close match. We played well as a team, with Aidan providing good supporting running and Magnus and Eddie this time standing out in defence.
We then played Richmond again (their second team) and won comfortably, despite Sam standing in for one of their players and scoring 4 of their 5 tries against us! We finally lost a match, our last, against a strong London Irish team, but not without working hard right to the final whistle.
Everyone scored at least once and everyone focussed for the full two hours, which was really impressive. I was very proud of all the boys, especially for their excellent behaviour, their commitment and concentration, and for their sportsmanship in always playing fair and always shaking hands at the end of a game. Well done boys, and hopefully we can replicate our success in a few weeks' time when we play our home festival!
The other London Scottish U7 team consisted of Archie, Cameron, Toby, Elliot, Connor, Luca and Arturo. We played games against Richmond, Drifters, Richmond tigers and London Irish.
Our first try against Richmond came after about 10 seconds and we ended up winning that game convincingly 7-2. The games against the drifters and tigers went the same way with high scoring wins. Our final game against London Irish was very close but we sneaked through by a single try to win 7-6!
I was particularly impressed by the whole team's passing and positioning. Everyone played the game in the right spirit and with a smile on their faces!!
Special mention must go to the youngest player on the team, Luca, for some excellent try-saving tagging! Also Cameron, Arturo and Toby used their bulldog training to good effect side-stepping around the opposition to score plenty of tries!
One of the reasons we did so well was that when the other team had the ball we stood in a spaced out defensive line which gave the opposition no spaces to run into. Well done to Conner, Elliot and Archie for keeping this formation throughout the games.
A very good start to the season, well done!
