Club falter against Aberdeen

Club 5 - 16 HKCC

The sad news is that there will be no league and cup double in 2008/09. After successfully seeing off Valley in the first round last weekend, Club stumbled against a very motivated and well-organised Abderdeen team on Saturday, eventually succumbing 16-5.

Club will be disappointed with a peformance in which they were rarely able to achieve much continuity or fluency, but it is still the beginning of campaign and the greatest prize in Hong Kong rugby - the first grade championship - has not even started yet.

Without question, Club looked rusty. Injuries and absences had enforced wide-ranging changes in team composition from the previous week. But in spite of struggling to find cohesion and impose themselves on the opposition, Club were still able to restrict the score to 0-3 until the last third of the match. It is often and, I think, rightly said that a mark of a good team is their ability to compete when not playing well, and that was certainly true of Club at the weekend.

While this was not the team performance we might have hoped for, there were a number of encouraging signs. The scrum was dominant throughout the game as Pete Spizziri, Tom Bolland and Nigel Hobler took control. There were also fine performances in the forwards from Tim Griffin, Tim Edgar and, after their introduction in the second half Nathan Johnson and Rob Mills.

For much of the game, though, quality ball for the backs was extremely scarce. The backline, led by Captain James Kibble, was solid in defence but had little space or opportunity to attack. Too often, Club were either turned over in the tackle area or rather zealously penalised for holding on or going in off the feet. The effect, I'm afraid, was to stifle any kind of forward movement. Club only briefly gained momentum through a series of well-executed phases later in the second half in a pattern that led to Rob Mills' try. Aberdeen competed hard at the ruck and were smart in terms of pushing what they could get away with - my abiding memory of a few minutes on the pitch is charging into a few rucks only to find one of the Pale brothers standing up after making the tackle and coming in from the same side as the Club forwards...

Club can and will do better. As several people remarked after the game: "good teams sometimes just have off days." What's crucial now is to turn this off day into a catalyst for the future.

Harps