February 19, 2008.
It felt like I had never been away. With barely a training session and any match practice whatsoever, I was (quite willingly) thrown into the line of fire against Pioneer Secondary School.
From pre-match rumours we could more or less quite confidently tell that we were going to face an onslaught from Pioneer. Ranked supposedly 3rd, we were facing Pioneer on the back of contrasting first gameweeks. Pioneer ran riot against Hillgrove eventually reaching a walkover score of 80-0. On the other hand, my teemates had managed to bravely hold RI to a 70-0 scoreline.
So I guess it was fair to say that today was going to be a game of damage limitation.
It felt like I had never been away. With barely a training session and any match practice whatsoever, I was (quite willingly) thrown into the line of fire against Pioneer Secondary School.
From pre-match rumours we could more or less quite confidently tell that we were going to face an onslaught from Pioneer. Ranked supposedly 3rd, we were facing Pioneer on the back of contrasting first gameweeks. Pioneer ran riot against Hillgrove eventually reaching a walkover score of 80-0. On the other hand, my teemates had managed to bravely hold RI to a 70-0 scoreline.
So I guess it was fair to say that today was going to be a game of damage limitation.
ACS(Intl) v. Pioneer SS
I felt an odd sense of dejavu as i recalled the B-Divs last year where we had to play both the heavyweights ACS(Br) and Unity in the first two games. So i guess, since we were the underdogs, there was a lot of pressure off us. But still, nervousness filled the air.
Right from the get-go, we were put under severe pressure with Pioneer virtually camping in our -22. We managed to hold on for about a minute before they put one past us. And then another. And then another. We were going down pretty fast in the early stages until we put up some kind of resistance after the third try.
The rest of the first half was kept in midfield where they we held them back desperately but quite efficiently only to conceed an occasional try.
With the first half drawing to a close we managed to grab a try through some great resilience from the forwards in pinning back the opponents in their -22 and for Russell to finish the move off with a try. We were back in it.
Then it was my turn. First kick in a long while. Walking up to place the cone at the spot always feels like forever. Nervousness. It was right under the posts, and thank God my boot made good contact with the unbelievably-hard Gilbert ball to send through the center of the posts. Half-time.
The team really believed that we could give this a shot as we trodded out for the second half. Even as the game ended at 57-7, there was no disgrace done, no disgrace at all. The team, especially the forwards worked unbelievably hard and creadit to the whole team for hanging on. Maybe, just maybe this was going to be our season after all. The feeling was good.
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