Malindi RFC 8 - Pwani University 5

Things are coming along quite well at the club, we had our 3rd friendly in a month which is great and second victory on home ground.  The most encouraging part is we are starting to get some fans come out to the game, it's quite a nice place to spend a saturday afternoon as the Malindi High ground is surrounded by trees and there is quite a nice breeze!

Thanks especially to Stefano for coming out and taking pictures of the match, now that I've started playing the full 80 minutes I'm not able to take pics!  We really appreciate it!

The game itself was ok.  I actually thought we should have dominated the scoreboard.  As I wanted to play and there were no other refs someone from their side reffed and it was pretty clear that a) he had never reffed before and b) he was doing his best to give his boys the advantage.  Fairplay, I just told the boys to keep their mouths shut and play harder, it was a good experience for them.

Our pack did well as usual but didn't dominate like against South Coast.  We were missing some key players.  Simba only made it for part of the second half as he had to work and Dzenya played fly half which he is not very well suited for since he likes to bang away with the ball in hand.  We also had Teddy at Scrum Half in the first half (he's a natural hooker) and that sort of killed the flow of the ball at the start of the game.  But things improved a bit when Tyson Kiema came in at 9.  He's a great player who is really coming into his own but still has some issues that I can't figure out, he only showed up at half time despite being at the school.  He's a great player when he puts his mind to it and even a good leader.  I wish I could figure out how to motivate him properly!

At any rate, we mostly were on our back foot in the second half, the game was scrappy.  I really thought we should have crushed these guys but the pack play broke down again in the second half and with lots of injuries and substitutions we never really had a good flow going.  Waweru took over the reffing in the second half and did extremely well, he really has grown as a ref, and I suppose I appreciate him more after seeing some of the other horror shows on the coast!

At any rate, seems things keep looking up.  Carefully selecting a sponsor as I want a good match for the boys so that we can move upward and onward.

Very high attacking scrum, need to work on this!

Nice run to the outside, looks like they are all running sideways though!

Some fans, nice day for rugby eh boys?