FOCUS ONTHEMIGHTYVANDALS
Through flickering’s of light cloud cover, the still and easy midday sun blanketed the area with an aura of calm that promoted running rugby. Alright, less of that… I lied about looking up about creative writing, so I’ll drop that malarkey and get back to typing out my usual drivel.
FYLDE VANDALS (3rd XV) 48: 10 GARSTANG BLUES (2nd XV): match report by Cian O’Donnell. Well, it’s probably fair to say that a lot has happened since the time the ‘Vandals’ played their last match on the 18th January. As a quick-fire recap, history will tell us that America swore in their somehow trusted returning president, we are into week 3 of the Six Nations, and unlike the Welsh rugby team, a revitalised Everton, back under the guidance of David Moyes’, have started to win games again.
So admittedly we are no longer living in the same world as we were back in mid-January.
Following two bruising encounters between our clubs, Orrell have sadly had to drop out of the Division 3N league. They were two memorable hotly contested games, so a shame all round to see the results now scrubbed from the league table, but also on seeing their 2nd XV being wound up for the rest of the season, so wishing them all the very best in hopefully fielding two senior sides again next year. The Vandals have since had a postponement and walkover victory, which is grand, but still meant that we had an eager squad available and itching to play again after a 5-week layoff. Enter a hungry and determined Garstang side on our fixtures list to get the juices flowing. Hopefully fair to the away side in saying that results suggest that while they may have struggled at the early stanzas of the season, however it seems like they turned a corner. Although losing to a good Blackburn team, they have posted some impressive results in the league recently. Chiefly, a strong win against Ormskirk, beating Vale of Lune (who we lost to in December), a convincing win away to Bolton (where we were given quite a scare), and even fielded two teams to beat Fleetwood and Lancaster University the previous week. Garstang had earned our full respect before our first duel against our sides this season. Some rustiness was probably expected on our behalf, but we said that we can’t allow complacency, poor preparation, or lack of effort cost us this game. A strategically late posting of the Garstang teamsheet concluded that ex-Vandal Chris Cardwell had been ruled out with injury – I’m sure we’ll see the bionic Chris and his all-action playing style in the return fixture. ‘Control the controllables’ is a common saying in the sporting world. Effectively, draw a line down the middle and focus on the side that you can add influence and ignore the side that you can’t. Hopefully an accurate assessment to someone that understands sporting psychology a lot more than me, but my take of this is that fair play to our opposition agreeing to allow extra subs, but our own pre-match build up came with more bumps and hazards than our training pitch… We lost some men up the ladder, and had to manage a changed structure seeing as we were sharing 2 playable pitches amongst 3 senior teams all playing at home. Don’t get me wrong, not painting a ‘woe is me’ picture here, far from it, just that it was quite a different pre-match routine and one we knew we had to control to avoid losing too much focus. After quite a bit of criticism over my writing style of previous match reports after a few jars, I decided to do a quick Google search to help with some creative writing. It highly suggested to ‘set the scene’ somewhere towards the beginning, so here goes:
TO THE GAME…
Garstang got the match underway and Fylde made their intent known in the early exchanges.
I will avoid giving a blow-by-blow account of the match, as it would be shockingly inaccurate. Fylde stood strong in the early scrums, and after Garstang’s hooker applied some pressure on our feed, we began to thankfully exert some dominance with a Tristan Assad and Tom Fox prop-combo showing that both men were up for the challenge. Garstang chose to run a number of penalties and they had some strong looking ball carriers. It was clear that this wasn’t their first rodeo, and we needed to focus on playing our own game and not getting sucked into allowing the away team to dictate the structure of the game (does that sound ok? I’d have no idea what that meant if ever questioned on it, I mean its social rugby and we don’t play at Twickenham). Anyways, the Vandals started to get points on the board with some slick link-plays and well supported line breaks that resulted in a number of tries. In his own words, Craig Davies claims to have scored a ‘beauty’ of a try in the first half, but the memory escapes me and without his father Steve being there with his camera today, I’m lacking proof, but will have to take his word on it on this occasion.
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