OC's 0 - 5 Rosslyn Park Hatters

The OCs began they biggest ever season at their newly found home ground at Richmond. The summer break had allowed the players to rest their injuries and return brimming with vitality and fitness, particularly after those exhaustive pre-season training routines!

The match day squad was a healthy size and contained a good spread of talent in all departments. It was a great shame that having assembled a fantastic front row for the day with OC favourites Ali Turner and Henry Brace, recent additions Steve Hartland and Vasey and debutant James Alvis. On witnessing the awesome might of this front row squad, the Hatters clearly wimped out and claimed they could not produce a front row and so we had to settle for unapposed scrums.

Having said that, the match lacked nothing in terms of physical confrontations. The backs were quickly brought into action with anther debutant, Rhodri Williams providing service from scrum half to Simmo to work his dummy scissors, and other such manoeuvres with the centres and despite fluent work in the centre from Huw Maggs and Matt Mann, it was still a rare day that wingers Tom James and Jim Breeze saw much ball to showcase their talents.

Regular OC observers will wonder where last season's regular wingmen Paul Kellet and Owen Verrier-Jones were - sadly the latter was an injured observer on the sidelines (Editor - how on earth did he manage to mention himself when he wasn't even playing?), but the Kellet was an emergency second row. And so we come to the line out - historically an area of the game that the OCs have had a chequered past - but with Mark Li taking responsibility for throw ins, it was Kellet - ably hoisted up by Josh Galaun and James Alvis all game. Clean take after clean take marked our lineout and it was really only first class defense from the Hatters that prevented us making more of this possession.

Around the park we were competitive in all areas, but so were Rosslyn Park. Rich Butler, Ali Turner and James Alvis specialised in earning the OCs some very hard yards in the face of tough tackling, while Brace, Mark Li, Gareth Lewis-Lloyd and Vasey marked themselves out by covering every inch of grass in defense and in support of our attacks. OC perenial sicknote and match day skipper Ian Jones came on as a second half sub, but injury saw him toddling off again five minutes later.

The lack of talk about tries in this report is because there was only one and we didn't get it. Special mention though has to go to Josh who for the second game running managed to get himself lamped - this time, the incident occured right in front of the ref with cherubic faced josh not bothering to defend himself leaving the ref little choice but to offer the assailant 10 minutes rest on the sideline - despite the added pressure, the Hatters defended well and the breakthrough never came - but realistically, this was as tough a test as we will face this season and the quality of OC play suggests the tries and the victories are surely not far away.

MotM goes to an OC debutant who played with plenty of enthusiasm and broke through the opposition first line of defence on a number of occasions - James Alvis.

OVJ