So....about Chico

Well actually I'll start off with this lovely pic of our rucks against Sac State. In other words...high and not coming in through the gate. On the plus side you can see our gorgeous pitch in the background. Yep, good ol' UC Santa Cruz. We'll be hosting the regional playoffs this year and that should be a royal pain in the ass.

Meh. So we left Santa Cruz at 9 o'clock in the morning and arrived in Chico around 3 which left us with half an hour before kick off. The ride...erm...let's just say sitting in a twelve person van with a cold and bad heating was an all around poor decision on my part. I played like utter slop and my team made sure to inform me about it. I made my tackles, threw some decent lineouts, and hooked decently in the scrums. Besides a few runs (and a try that Soooooooo should have counted) I managed to miss every single ruck and was late to every scrum and lineout. So I'm feeling like shit today after a miserable 5 1'2 hour car ride back. Yep.

We held our own against Chico's B-side for most of the first half then proceeded to get trounced all over the field. It was literally tit for tat for the first three trys until they broke away. While we were winning the ball in scrums we couldn't hold them and while we had a number of rookies and new combinations..well our performance was plain shoddy. We haven't taught crabbing to our new rookies yet so we couldn't handle their wheels, luckily they would wheel AFTER regaining possession so we'd keep the put in and re-scrum.

Their fullback and one of their centers looked great and did well running the ball with steam and punching through our defense at a depressing rate. Naima Reddick was playing flanker and plain ol' smacking the crap out our young side and I'm proud to have just slown her down once or twice. Their mauls were really impressive, they had the skill to pass the ball back from the center of it to the back and present it to their scrum-half, they were damn efficient in their long-body rucking, and were the first to every single breakdown. They were aggressive as all hell and I wish our B-side played like that/we had a b-side. Considering that there was only one or two a-side members playing...well I have to say Chico has more depth to their team then goff gives them credit for.

I do have to say I found the game particularly frustrating because if our a-side had been there we could have shown them a bit more of what Santa Cruz can do. But alas it was still a good learning match for our rookies and frankly we needed a good ass kicking and I'm just bitter that we had to drive 9 hours to get it (which beats the 3000 odd mile flight to Florida).