The 2012/13 Swiss Ladies rugby season finally kicked-off this Saturday in Luzern. The league this year will be an experimental format seeing the ladies playing five Super 7’s tournaments alongside a 15’s league where clubs with smaller playing squads may join together.
8 teams came together for the first Super 7’s of the year in the exact opposite of desirable 7’s conditions: cold, wet and muddy!
The Dangels were in a tough group containing their traditional rivals for the league, Zurich as well as last season’s 7’s runners-up, Bern. Opening the tournament against Zurich whilst coaches and players alike were dealing with the organizational aspects of the tournament was challenging.
We got off to a good start v. a strong Zurich 7 with Carole flying down the touch line to score. We had worked hard on our kick-offs and these worked well, allowing us to keep the opposition under pressure all day. Some solid defensive work and working the rustiness out of our moves saw us run out 22-0 winners.
We set ourselves the goal of not conceding any tries during the tournament and knew this would be tough against Bern, whom we narrowly beat to clinch last season’s 7’s title. Again we started well and then managed to keep them under pressure with good work from our kick-offs. Excellent defense from Lolli at sweeper meant that we could meet our goal of no tries against us.
The next matches against Basel and then CERN in the semi-final followed a similar pattern; we started well, scored early and applied a lot of pressure on the opposition. Legs and lungs were certainly hurting, but despite the conditions we were having a tonne of fun back out on the pitch together.
As many predicted, the day ended as it started: Luzern v. Zurich who beat the winners of the other group, Konstanz in their semi-final. This game followed a similar pattern to the rest and we took a significant lead in the first half, although Zurich always looked threatening. Unfortunately, the blood left our brains to attend to our tiring legs and we continued to commit too many bodies to the breakdown, allowing Zurich to break free on either wing towards the end of the match: final score 22-12.
A fantastic effort by the 11 players in the match-day squad, our 3 coaches and everyone from the club who helped organize a great event; 7’s may be a summer sport but it was an awesome day; thank-you everyone!
In absentia of any horns, there was no devil-of-the-day award, so we made 2 angels-of-the-day; for tireless work in defense and thoughtful skills in attack the wings went to Petra and Esti. Special award and ‘Welcome Back’ to Mammi-Nadja, the PivotMeister. Esti became the first naked winner of a beer-race in my memory; nice work!
Tries: Lolli (a bucketful), SarahTwins, Esti, Petra (an indeterminate number each), possibly other people (my brain was frozen) Conversions: Lolli (a slightly smaller bucketful), TazMac (a couple whilst Lolli had a well-deserved breather)
Players: Angi, Ritchie, Iris, Nadja, TazMac, Tigger, Sarah, Esti, Lolli, Lea, Manu Special mention to Julia who only managed to arrive 10 mins before the final kicked-off
Bring on the 15’s!!
written by TazMac