Year 9 Grimsby and District Rugby

April 25th, 2008

With the year 7 and 8 teams dominating their tournaments the year 9s could feel the pressure. Previous years had seen this team defeated in early rounds and in a semi final so the boys had a lot to prove.
    
Six teams entered the year 9 competition and these were split between two leagues for the early stages. We needed to be placed first or second in the league to make it through to the knockout stages later.

After Jordan Smith had taken the team through an excellent warm up the boys were ready to face their first opponents, Hereford. This team looked fairly strong with some big players but this didn’t scare the Tollbar players who were focussed on the task ahead. After the whistle it wasn’t long before Tollbar’s first try coming from Will Smith. This was followed by three more tries (Smith, Fowler and Pinion) to end the half 20 points to nil.
The team remained unchanged for the second half and again dominated score another 20 points from four awesome tries (Fowler, Fytche, Smith and Maddinson).

The next match on our pitch saw Hereford loose their second game to Whitgift meaning that we would at least make second place in the league to get through to the semi finals. Second wasn’t good enough for Tollbar BEC however who went on to beat Whitgift a massive 55 points to nil with tries from Carr, Fowler 2, Drury, Fytche 2, Dewires, W. Smith, Payne, and J. Smith 2.

Our semi final was against Lindsey School, a team who had previously well beaten our year 9s in a friendly last season. Today was a different story with Tollbar tries coming left right and centre leaving us ahead by 30 points at half time and 45 points at the end. Tries were scored by Fytche 2, Soady, Carr 3, Fowler, W. Smith and Maddinson.

The final was against Healing and although the boys had dominated the competition so far they were not over confident about the final and knew it wasn’t going to be easy. However, 3 minutes after the whistle had blown Steven Drury scored a great try to get the Tollbar team moving. The team followed with three more tries (Fytche 2 and J. Smith) in the first half to give us a comfortable 20 point cushion going into the second half. The second half followed a similar pattern to the first half and the previous matches with Tollbar dominating the play. They managed another four tries (Fytche 2, J. Smith and Morris) in this half leaving the team victorious at 40 points to nil.

The team scored a massive 180 points without conceding a single try. This was a fantastic effort by all involved. Behaviour and performances with excellent, well done!