This was our first home game of the 2011/ 2012 season and with some good weather it promised to be a good day for rugby as we welcomed Bath under 8's.

The Bath coach was kind enough to referee in the absence of Tom and it turned out to be a very useful training/ competitive couple of matches with the referee pre-warning both teams he was going to be picking up off sides, knock-on's, forward passes and touch. He did this very well and between us we were able to stop the games and explain why the decisions had been made and review the players positioning.

The under 8's pitch had been moved to the training pitch at the bottom of the field next to the trees which was a bit of shelter from the wind but unfortunately it was also bit of a distraction for a few players who where more interested in playing in the trees and throwing old beer bottles around!!

Once we had everyone's attention Nadine and I were able to run through a few drills which went quite well and we had reviewed what was good and bad about our performance the previous week.

One of the boys must have told the referee we were 'tigers' so we were referred to as the 'Tigers' for the morning by the ref and at times we lived up our name. From the restarts there was some good pressing defence and we did pretty well tagging but as the game broke down after one or two tags we started to loose our flat line defence. Bath had some very good runners who were able to exploit this.

Going forward we were very good as always with some great runs and some >fantastic support play and passing. Bath however were better organised than us in defence and managed to get the seven tags for a turn over ball on a couple of occasions and we managed to stray into touch on a couple of occasions also.

Another area that we need to concentrate on is not to over crowd the tagged player, on too many occasions we had players grouping around the ball carrier (which is great that they want the ball) but this confusion caused a few knock-on's.

All in all it was a very good performance but unfortunately against a very >well organised Bath team and too many errors  by us gave them the ball. All of our players had some great moments in defence and attack and it was good to have the players starting to organise each other in particular Freddy who has consistently in previous weeks done the same. For his marshalling, good tagging and forward running the man of the match goes to Freddy.

The first game Bath won 5 tries to Ivel's 4 and the second short game Bath won 2 tries to Ivel's 0.

Thank you to all the players and parents/ grandparents that came on Sunday and to Alex's younger and better looking stand in for the day for taking the register and organising the meal tickets.

Many thanks to Steve for running with the boys in my absence ad Alexs dad for helping out too.