Quins Cup Success for two Fifth Form pupils

On Wednesday 23 April, Hugo Bain and Dylan Siow (both Fifth Form) played in the Quin’s cup rugby tournament at The Stoop, home to Harlequins RFC. Representing Wimbledon RFC, they managed to win a tense final 13-12 against top seeded team Battersea Ironsides. Below is Hugo’s report:

“My team 鈥淲imbledon RFC鈥� was formed in 1865 and no youth team has won any trophy for the last 20 years. However this year our u15s, the team Dylan Siow (another boy in 5th form) and I represent, made it to the final of the Quin鈥檚 cup, at the stoop (Harlequins stadium), after finishing first in our pool. The competition consisted of 12 clubs split into two seeded pools of 6 and we were seeded sixth overall so it was a surprise that we even made final where we faced Battersea Ironsides who seeded first overall and had played in the previous two finals at u13s and u14s, winning in u13s. Moving on, throughout the first half it was a proper dog fight.聽 Although both teams had chances to score it remained scoreless at the half. After an inspirational team talk from our head coach and our captain we went out there with the aim to score first. We kicked off to start the second half and we ended up winning the ball back pushing up the field and scoring within the first five minutes to make it 5-0 to Wimbledon. However Battersea were quick to respond and ended up scoring a try minutes later tying the score at 5-5. For the next 15 minutes it went back to being a dogfight until our flanker blocked the fly half’s clearance kick, caught the ball and scored, however our fly half missed the conversion again making it 10-5 with 10 minutes to go. Battersea weren鈥檛 going to give up and even after we put in a massive defensive shift for 6 minutes, they powered their way over the line and made the conversion going up by 2 points with less than 4 minutes to go. I thought that might be it, that we had lost and this was further emphasised when we knocked the ball on off kickoff. However we somehow won the ball back with minimal time remaining but we ended up conceding another knock on with less than minute to go. Everyone thought the game was over and that Battersea would get the ball out the scrum and kick it off for the win, but against all odds we won the scrum against the head and fed the ball to our backs. The ensuing panic caused Battersea to give away 3 penalties with one being right in front of the posts on their 22. Although our fly half had missed all his kicks during the game he converted the one that mattered to win the game by a point.”