Clean pair of heels - Week 2

Monday 12th January: passing the ball first then game plan from scrums. Movement patterns are getting better. Still stuff to be worked on but so far we are getting there. Justine rounded Rose, Charlotte and Rachel on separate occasions. Even if we all knew what she was going to do it they were still left choking in the dust after she showed them a clean pair of heels. Watching it happen was like in slow motion fast forwarded. Neat! Then Aggie stopped Brenda dead in her tracks with a classic hand-off: the stunned look on Brenda’s face was comical. Haaaaaaaaaa. Guess the two of them are now even.


Wednesday 14th January: passing and contact skills then game plan from scrums and lineouts. It was one of those bad days: nothing seemed to go right. Aaaaaaargh. I won’t even talk about it. We’ll sort ourselves out on Friday.


Friday 16th January: we had started warming up when ICEMARK – our sponsors – came to have a word with us. The MD Christian and Tony reiterated their unwavering commitment to women’s rugby. Actually Tony did not say anything; he just smiled at us all. Christian reminded us that it is first blood, sweat and tears before tender loving care. They spent 2 minutes with us then Christian told us to get back to work. I liked the pair of them. Short, sweet and encouraging and unlike our government they are giving us financial aid and appreciate our efforts.

We completed our warm up then started the session with 20 metre sprints – 10 continuous ones. The backs had to do them in under 54 secs and the forwards in under 1 minute. We did 3 sets of those with a 1 minute break in between. For the next drill we paired up weight wise. We had to carry our partners in our arms (baby carry) to the 5 then sprint back to the try line. Carried our partners to the 10 on our backs then sprinted back, and then do the fireman’s lift to the halfway then we both sprint back. We did three sets of those as well. No breaks in-between. The final drill was front on tackles. Person on the 5 tried to charge over the try line.
Somewhere during the session we did ball handling. Not quite sure where though but it was looking good.

We ended the session with game plan from scrums. Brenda switched from hooking the propping and pulled it off pretty well- actually really well. On her first hit, her opposite number Aggie squealed in surprise and Rose (who was hooking) grunted ‘oh, I really felt you’ and they back peddled against the impact. My offloads from the base of the scrum are still pretty dodgy and we had a couple of unforced handling errors but once we sorted all that out it was looking quite good.

Saturday 17th January: once again we trained in sweltering heat. Ball work which is really now looking good and communication is getting better. From there we moved to game plan from scrums. It’s starting to come together and look more natural. Still a few things to iron out but we’ve got to be patient with ourselves.