Warning proud coach ramblings coming up...

It's so funny when you look at our team over the last few years before games they are clowning around, rolling down hills, wrestling each other, weeing in bushes, generally running amok...in other words just being kids and being kids that love hanging out with each other as a team. But when that kick off goes, it is go time and they are ready to rumble. We will gradually get more and more organisation and discipline but we must always protect the fun in the team.

What I am most happy with his how they are now becoming self organising and leading themselves on the pitch. Before the Percy Park game I gave them some general guidelines, "we play with two players wide on either side and we nominated those two players to buddy up covering the wing. The rest of the team spread out across the pitch between the 4 wide players." If you look at the video the kids were much better at holding their shape at the Festival. They were very vocal in organising themselves. They even came up with their own idea to have one person sitting a bit deeper to cover at the back.

Last season we probably had around 3 players regularly getting stuck into the tackle. What we saw today was every single person on that pitch was getting stuck in both in defence tackling but also running forward with the ball. We scored 25 tries as a team. Some of those tries saw 6 different (out of 9) players handling that ball before the score. We saw the boys exploring how to move the ball forward through passing, running and getting kicks in to gain ground. Kicking is not always the best idea but I want to encourage them to explore it, to find their own way of playing the game.

But what about the defence...we only conceded 10 tries. If you view the videos what you will see is a whole team effort in defence, if we come up against a big player then the whole team jump in to get him down. You pick on one Blyth lad you pick on all of us. There was some huge hits coming in from Felix and Connor in the Festival. I love the fact that when faced against a player twice the size/weight Connor, James and Robbie didn't hesitate to get stuck in and chop him down.

There is so much gold dust in the video of the boys playing, for example Harry's blind / no look pass over his head, then 3 passes later Connor score in the right hand corner. Or how about the boys cunning plan to from their own try line kick over the head of Percy Park, chase it down, pop it from the floor for Chris to go over the line and score.

Three games, three wins. 7 tries to 5 vs Percy Park, 6 tries to 2 vs Rockcliffe and 12 tries to 3 vs Ashington.

We know what we are great at, running and passing. We discovered today that we can defend like a team and really put pressure on teams with strong, kick, chase and tackle. We still need to develop our rucking game so we can get even more ball to enjoy going forward and scoring with.

Huge well done to all the boys they did themselves proud today.