Firstly, a big thank you to the boys (and parents!) who gave up the final day of their half term holiday to head up to Crieff to play in the annual Ardvreck 7’s which is always one of the highlights of the rugby season. Taking a look through the programme, over the past 20 years Cargilfield have regularly appeared in the Main Final, winning the tournament on a number of occasions, and also winning the Plate Final a few times too. Despite having a very young team this year, I still had high hopes for success as we had worked hard in the week before half term on our patterns of play, our strategy for sevens and although we lacked some physicality, we possessed plenty of skill and rugby know how…….but a sevens tournament is a long, long day and the fact it was taking place in half term did not allow for the perfect preparation!

On what was a glorious sunny Autumnal morning, with the leaves turning and a glistening dew on the pitches, we arrived at Ardvreck to learn that a team had withdrawn and so our group only had Fettes and Craigclowan in it, which gave us some confidence for the day ahead. However, that confidence was soon to be misplaced as we faced a physical Craigclowan side in our opening game and very quickly found ourselves three tries down with some missed tackled in the midfield which was disappointing and we were strangely lethargic in attack when we had the ball. We did score but lost the tie and this meant that we had a must win game against Fettes to get through to the Main Cup competition. We had beaten Fettes comfortably earlier in the season, but once again we never really got going and despite losing Monty and James to injuries, we were rather lacklustre and lacked penetration with the ball even though we kept hold of it; once again, our defence was a bit leaky and missed tackles allowed Fettes to score and we were out!

After two disappointing results, both games which we certainly should have won if we had played anything like we could have, the day could have gone one of two ways…….we could have capitulated and given up, or we could dig deep and look to put things right and win the Plate. I was not too sure how it would go, but to their enormous credit, the boys did dig deep and they found a way and began to show what they were capable of.

The opening game of the Plate group saw us up against Loretto and we squeaked through by a conversion in what was a tight game, but we played well and this really gave the team a boost as we faced up to Sedbergh B team. Here, we played some excellent rugby and won the game comfortably and it was a shame that an unfortunate injury to a Sedbergh player meant the game finished early; thankfully, he was okay and it was nice to come up against Mr Lush once again, formerly of this parish!