rugby/oxford

i'm in oxford for the weekend, visiting nish at her college. took megabus (£2.50 return trip, how cheap is that?) yesterday evening and arrived in oxford in 2 hours.

the weather's been really crap here - it rained the whole of today (still raining actually). it's nice to get out of london a bit and see another part of the uk. last night i hung out with nish and some of her fellow college students, we tried to go to this club nicknamed 'filth' (apparently the floors are so sticky and icky, you get literally stuck to it if you stand on the same spot for more than 2 minutes) but then the queue was too long (one-in-one-out, the worse kind) so we headed back to the college's junior common room and just lounged around. the people here seem nice, but it's obvious that they all study quite a lot (to put it mildly). and oxford's a nice town, with a fair amount of heritage and old historical buildings (the colleges are quite impressive).

but i think i prefer studying in london. a campus university certainly breeds a sense of community - in nish's college there's a bar where lots of students hang out and the atmosphere is very warm and convivial, unlike that of the bars i've been to in london - but then it may get quite boring and stifling after awhile. it's good for studying though - few distractions.

london, on the other hand... every day you learn something new about the city, about other people, and about yourself. there's always something to do (in most cases, too many other things to do). and it's bloody £££, but oh well.

.

we played against the uni of kent on wednesday, in a match that, for me, is best described as 'brave but scrappy'. both teams were relatively inexperienced (with only a handful of seniors and, as far as i could tell, no coach at hand.

to cut a long story short, we won 35-5, thanks to some gritty incisive runs by our seniors. i played inside centre for the most part of the 70 minutes (it was cut short because 1/3 of our team - myself included - arrived in kent late due to a combination of late lectures in school and public transport woes. but i digress) and fullback in the last 5-10 minutes.

to be honest, i found myself unwillingly frustrated at times during the match, because the ball seldom travelled to the backline. each time there was a scrum, we (the backs) would align ourselves perfectly and await the ball, only to see the scrumhalf collect it (that is, if we actually won our scrums) from behind the scrum and dash off with it into the opposition. the forwards kept taking up the ball, it was obvious that they were keen on taking the ball and crashing up, but it seldom occured to them that there were a line of backs who had gaps to exploit and tries to score - if they could first get their hands on the ball!

the rucks were also grey areas, and there were forward balls and knock-ons aplenty, but that was to be expected as the ball was wet and most of us were new. the poor captain/scrumhalf/kicker (i'll call her emm) missed all 7 conversions (apparently she'd not practised a single kick all summer) and voted herself 'tit of the match' (think of it as 'player-who-screwed-up-the-most'). on a positive note, our hooker (shall call her soph) who's also new to rugby was really gungho and tenacious, made many good runs and tackled well despite her size (she's stockier but smaller and shorter than me) and got voted 'forward of the match'. :)

after the match i had an extended chat with one of my team mates - a fijian girl from america who's here for a year as an affiliate student. she'd played 15s before, and when we started discussing the match i discovered that she'd felt the same way as i did (about the forwards hogging the ball and everything). we noted that this was the first match and it was more about letting everyone get some match experience than about winning at all costs, but all the same we agreed that 'real' matches don't always happen like that, and if we ever faced stiffer opposition we couldn't afford this kind of slipshot play. oh, and defence-wise, we didn't let kent make any breaks, but that was because there were only at most 3 or 4 of them who could run (and not really dangerously anyway). but there were countless times i thought to myself while on defence: "s*** they've got a 5-on-3 overlap on us!"; but all such thoughts usually evaporated soon enough because they never exploited their overlaps.

i truly don't mean to denigrate anything here, but our standard is kind of low at the moment. and the worse thing is, i can't help but make comparisons with blacks and see how different things are. i miss playing with blacks.

maybe i'm just feeling unsatisfied because of the match, even though we won.

i'll stop now. because otherwise i wouldn't cease this inane monologue.