What's the worst rugby ground?

It's mid-day now, and I've just about thawed out from last night at training.

I suppose it's the cost of land that means so many clubs are sited next to rivers or on hillsides but it does make them pretty chilly places.

Here's a list of a few horrors, have you any others to add?

• Nottingham Moderns - Under 14 County training was marked by freezing winds off the Trent, whilst the smell from the pie factory reminded me of home, warmth and food.

• Derby - we won there as Under 12s but the Derby coach threw a tantrum as the winning try went down in a puddle so big it had washed the try line away and he tried to deny us the score.

• Sheffield Tigers - at this year's Lexus Festival the U13s played on a pitch that was little more than a bit of rough grazing with posts at each end. The U16s had a better pitch but the toilets blocked and as the resident jobsworth wouldn't let us stand inside the barrier we had to paddle through sewage.

The state of shirts to come?

I was just notified about a new posting from somebody talking about the new Stade Francais shirts - apparantly they quite like the Warhol rip-off shirts for this season. I don't. And just as I thought things couldn't get any worse I found this link to Ralph Lauren. Here you start with a reasonably tasteful shirt and turn it tasteless by "designing" some extra features for yourself.

The ordinary junior shirts at Nottingham are a riot of sponsors these days, and this blog is all about trying to find more sponsorship for the Under 16s (just in case you'd missed that bit) so I might be getting close to hypocrisy here but whatever happened to the days of cotton shirts with proper collars and traditional colours?

In a world of tight fit shirts plastered with logos and produced in colours rarely seen in nature am I the only one to deplore the new fashion? Or am I completely out of touch?

Nottingham Legend

Forgot to tell you - we had a donation from a former England player on Saturday at IKEA.

John Pallant played for Nottingham and England in the late 60s before giving it up because he took on a job that meant he had to work on Saturdays. How times have changed. Now he's retired he has time to go round IKEA.

Sunday - sorry it's not a very original title

6.30am - get up to put Number One son on the bus for the BIRC in Birmingham.

8.30am - breakfast at McDonalds (see how you are getting the plain truth here, warts, calories and all).

9.30am - bandaging hand of Number Two son who shouldn't be playing so soon after the fracture, but I'm not much of a parent when it comes to stuff like this.

10.30am - arrive for warm up. Only parking space left is in the middle of a puddle. Wet feet or walk from the car park next door? You guess.

11.00am - lend four players to Paviors, who are having problems due to half term. Half time score 14-7, one of our own players scoring for the opposition. Full time score 29-7. Number Two son survives uninjured despite selecting the biggest player on the pitch to hone his tackling technique (visions of Social Services recede).

12.30pm - Lunch. Embarrassed to say where. My dad once met Colonel Sanders. Draw your own conclusions.

2.30pm - Arrive at IKEA for more bag packing. Car park seems full, as does shop. Pack bags for someone wearing a Leicester Tigers' shirt. They can afford £50 for a shirt but nothing for us. Same thing was remarked on by my wife yesterday. I'm always amazed by the way some people will give you £5 for next to nothing and others give you nothing for ten minutes work. Members of local teams - Paviors, Ilkeston, West Bridgford pass through, chat and donate. Nice people. I will include links to their teams - just make sure you don't do anything foolish like joining them. They all have players at Nottingham Outlaws playing summer rugby league so why not come and support local rugby this summer? (Hope that plug wasn't too obvious).

5.00pm - Go home. Not what you expect when you mention the words "day of rest".

10.19pm - Email arrives from team manager - they went out on a family visit after IKEA , came back and have just counted the cash. What sort of person is at their computer at 10.19 pm doing junior rugby stuff? Tomorrow I am going to put a "thermometer" on the blog to show our progress.

Fundraising tomorrow

It's a big day tomorrow as we have fifteen tills to cover at IKEA.

Unlike bag packing at a supermarket the work is harder (due to the weight of the items) and less profitable (transactions take longer and as it is mainly credit card there is less change to drop in a bucket). However, beggars can't be choosers and it does have a couple of advantages.

One is that they let us eat in the staff canteen and two is that they go out of their way to make us welcome. Not all supermarkets do that. Tomorrow we will be the sole collectors, meaning we won't have to compete with the cute Brownies who creamed off all the cash at the entrance last time and we won't have to send Captain Hook to hassle Santa, as we had to do at a supermarket last Christmas.

It would take too long to explain all this, but I promise you that raising funds is not for the faint hearted. I am particularly pleased at the lack of cute Brownies as is one of our players, who was stitched up something rotten by them last year.

(Note to American readers - in the UK a Brownie is a small female paramilitary, not a chocolate confection.)

Play fair, or win?

Relating to the last question - I notice that Nottingham minis managed to win three groups at the recent Coalville Festival with a runner up and a semi-finalist in the other groups.

All teams won the Fair Play Award.

At last years Lexus Festival all four Nottingham Junior teams won their respective Fair Play awards.

It's good to get a fair play award, particularly if, like the U16s last year, you don't win a match. However, this year we were runners up and got medals, which felt better than any amount of fair play awards.

It's good to play fair, and it's good to play fair and win. But if you can only do one of the two, who prefers winning?

What makes a good coach of junior players?

We were talking about this last night as we watched training.

Is it necessary to have been a good player to be a good coach? Can you become a good coach merely by taking coaching courses? And of course, is coaching just about playing rugby or should we be teaching the players more than that?

Over to you.

Coming down to earth

It's not all Canada tours and watching National One games in junior rugby. There's training to be done too.

Specifically, last night, there's a 20 mile drive in the dark for the Nottinghamshire U16 county squad. And even more specifically, it wasn't so much training as waiting round in the car park for a keyholder to open the clubhouse at Newark.

Eventually one of the dedicated band of people who makes amateur rugby possible was dragged from his plate to open the club for us. He must have cursed, but you wouldn't guess it as he arrived an switched on the floodlights. I don't know his name, but I'd like to record my thanks.

It's not all Twickenham and OBEs in the world of rugby, it's mainly hard work and cold weather. Volunteers run the clubs, volunteers do the coaching, volunteers do the catering and sometimes, though not often, the RFU gives some support.

A couple of years ago we were told that kick off had been rearranged for an Under 11s match because Francis Baron and one of his RFU sidekicks wanted to come and watch grassroots rugby.

The day was wet and cold to an extent that we discussed whether it was suitable for the kids to be outside in it. The mud was ankle deep and one of our players was rooted to the spot by cold, but they gave us everything they had.

The RFU delegation watched from a distance. To be accurate, they watched from behind the shelter of a window in a heated room.

I will say no more.

Tour Planning II

After doing all the research it turned out that it was safer and easier to book with a tour company than to try to do it ourselves. It was also not much more expensive, though having said that we have just had a bill for insurance (£800) we weren't expecting.

I would have liked us to organise it for ourselves, giving us something to take some pride in, but seriously - why go to the trouble when someone else can do it for you (and probably better) for near enough the same price?

Anyway, the fundraising is hard enough without organising the whole tour from scratch.

I would tell you which company it is so you can book with them, but fund-raising makes you very hard. It's very difficult for me to mention any companies these days unless they show some interest in sponsoring the tour.

Rugby League World Cup

Details of BBC coverage can be found here.

England starts this weekend with a match against Papua New Guinea.

Anyone know what's unique about PNG in rugby terms?

(No, not the pre-match meal, no cannibal jokes after the Boris Johnson debacle.)

A rugby question

Now that Jonny Wilkinson has revealed himself to be a follower of Buddhist principles can we expect a new generation of rugby players coming through the system similar to the ones who now take a Jonny stance before kicking?


I can understand how a 10 can adopt principles of non-violence but can we now expect the tight five to start asking us about karma rather than clearing out?

Tour Planning Part I

The original plan was to go to New Zealand, a place The Leader referred to as "the Mecca of Rugby". At that point, I have to confess that my childish sense of humour lead me to search the web hoping to find a picture of the Mecca Bingo club in Rugby, Warwickshire. If I had found one I would be showing it now.


We discussed New Zealand but decided that it was probably too far and too expensive, particularly as my sister had just been there on holiday and her description of rain, sheep and the 1950s sounded so much like Derbyshire we might as well tour the Peak District. She did say you don't get volcanoes in Derbyshire, which in my view is another good thing about Derbyshire. Same for Australia as far as cost and distance goes, though susbstitute desert for Derbyshire.


Closer to home we looked at South Africa. However, we were thinking of organising it ourselves and the RFU won't sanction tours to South Africa unless they are organised by tour companies. This left us a bit stuck as the tour has to be after the exams and nobody much is playing rugby at that time of year.


Then somebody mentioned Canada and one of the parents revealed himself to be Canadian. This was a surprise as I had always thought he had a Somerset accent.

To be continued

And finally...

Nottingham 48 Newbury 3


Another good looking scoreline, but as the official match report shows, another scoreline that conceals a tough contest. I left the ground happy, but at half time I have to admit all I could think about was how could Nottingham be struggling? Newbury are ten League places below us and although it showed in the quality of play you'd have been hard put to tell that from the half time score or the determination on show from Newbury.


That's the trouble with rugby in National One. At the top you have teams like Nottingham trying to model themselves on full time Premiership sides and at the bottom you have teams that are modelled on traditional club sides. We are by no means a full time professional side but we are getting that way and the training regime is tough, particularly for those players who also have jobs.


You can often tell the difference from looking at the props. Ours are heavily muscled from working out: many of the props from lower placed teams look like the sworn enemies of salad. When the kids train on Wednesdays I have seen our team lifting weights in the garage that houses the grass cutters, so we are not the most luxurious of teams but in past years we have been visited by teams fielding props that looked like they seldom lifted anything heavier than a pie,and the difference shows.


There is a proposal drifting about to make the best National One teams part of a second division Premiership. As a supporter of a top National One team I am all in favour of that as it means we should get more funding. Unfortunately there is always some sort of proposal drifting about and it seldom seems to come to much.

The sad truth about rugby in England is that it just doesn't attract the crowds to bring in the sponsorship it needs.

Wiping something off the slate

Sunday morning, the so called day of rest, started, as it so often does, with me hitting the snooze button and wishing I had never had children. This was followed by the traditional fights over kit and and increasingly outrageous claims about things that had definitely been packed the night before only to be stolen/disappear/take on a life of their own and be generally absent from the place they had been left. Socks mysteriously migrate from one bag to another; gum shields flee their cases regularly and hide in jacket pockets or boot bags.



And then we started the daily discussion of why a fifteen year old needs 20 minutes in the bathroom with a pot of hair gel every morning. OK, as is often pointed out at this point, my hair care time has been reduced by natural wastage over the years, but even as a teenager it mostly consisted merely tugging a comb through it.



An hour later, having dropped wife and Number Two son off for training at our home ground, I started looking for a space to park near the West Bridgford RFC ground. It isn't easy but there was a good space near the entrance. It was a bit of a worry that even the 4x4 owners considered too rough to park on but it was that or walk half a mile.

If evolution had intended us to walk it wouldn't have provided us with the brains to invent cars.

The match, which I arrived just in time for, was not a showcase for free-flowing rugby. Two packs with something to prove and a gusting wind discouraged any fancy stuff and attempts at long passes inevitably came to grief.

Five minutes into the second half the score was 5-12 and we were making hard work of it. I had visions of a similar outcome to the last time we played, when a muddy day negated our winning streak and they held out for a narrow victory. This time, however, we didn't make the mistake of underestimating them and two more tries saw us win 5-24 despite them having the advantage of the wind.

It wasn't a pretty game, but I can live with an ugly win.

Better than shopping

Nottingham 33 Skegness 10



It wasn't a pretty game, the wind and the referee both having too much effect on the game to encourage free-flowing rugby, but it was more of a cliff-hanger than the final result suggests. It took half an hour to put the first points on the board and there were only eleven points between the teams with twenty minutes to go. Two tries in the last ten minutes finally put the game away and made Nottingham look comfortable winners.



In a match which pitted youthful enthusiasm against age experience the experience proved important in the first half but the fitness of youth finally triumphed. A bit like the story of my life really. (Note the picture above showing that Nottingham also had age and experience on their side - though I'm not saying which was which).

Meanwhile the referee matched the six tries with five sendings off (1 Red, 4 Yellow) and treated us all to his individualistic interpretation of the Laws of Rugby.

What more could you want on a Saturday afternoon? Well, my wife wanted to go shopping, but you can't have everything can you? Shopping versus EDF Junior Vase Round 3.Tough choice.

This Weekend

There's plenty of rugby action in Nottingham this weekend starting with Nottingham Boots Corsairs v Skegness at the Bay. Skegness are a strong team, NBC are currently undefeated. Should be good. Kick Off 2.30 pm.

Sunday morning sees the pick of the weekend as Nottingham Under 16s come up against West Bridgford. Having narrowly come second last time the teams met Nottingham has something to prove this time out. With a 25-0 victory in the rain over Melbourne last time out Nottingham are looking good.

Finally with a 3.00 pm Kick Off Nottingham v Newbury sees National One action at Meadow Lane. Hopefully it won't be too much of an anti-climax after the Under 16's game.

Eight months and counting...

Every rugby club has an ideas man. On his own he isn't that dangerous. But when he has a yes man with him going "Yes, that's a good idea, let's do it." things can get tricky.

So when The Leader said "Why don't we take the Under 15s abroad on tour next year?" we all looked at our feet and whistled, knowing nothing would happen if we all stayed quiet and avoided eye contact.

I still don't know why I said it. Years of experience told me to stay quiet but I heard a voice, my voice, saying "Yes, that's a good idea."

Obviously, eight months later, we are starting to run out of steam a little bit - you can only do so much bag packing, car booting, raffling and odd jobbing before you wish you had decided to tour Wales.

And that is why I am sitting here wrestling with technology, writing what is basically a begging letter. Somewhere floating around on the right is a PayPal Donation button. If you have a few spare pounds we would love to find a home for them. If you don't, that's fine but perhaps you could press some of the links that should be appearing on the blog soon and earn us a few pennies that way.

Over the next eight months we will be doing a lot more fund-raising (we aren't relying on my skill at web-based begging I promise you) so if nothing else, we should have a laugh.

With any luck I will also manage to put the Donation button somewhere that looks a little more professional...