Results - Memory Lane

New Zealand’s massive win over the USA last weekend has got me thinking about some of the more extreme scorelines in games in which I have been involved.

Biggest win? 108-0, playing for Peterborough Colts, back in (I think) the 1981-82 season. I can’t for the life of me remember who we played that day but I played on the blindside flank, having graduated from the second row that season. We had a seriously good Colts team that year and, when you think that a try back then was worth just 4 points, 108-0 was quite a result – I think we scored something like 20 tries that day and, although I can’t remember specifically, I would like to think I crossed the whitewash at least once!

Biggest defeat? I’ve suffered a few whoppers over the years, but I think the largest loss in which I played was probably my first ever game of rugby (more on that here) playing for my school’s under-15 team as a gangly lock back in 1979. Our team (who I don’t believe had ever won a game of rugby at the time) were completely battered by the opposition on a bone-hard pitch in early September. I remember almost crawling off at the end of the game, utterly exhausted and bruised and grazed from head to toe. Final score was 0-56. And I’d just had the best time!

Other strange results included a memorable (for mainly the wrong reasons) 3-0 victory for Cambridgeshire Schools Under 16s against a touring German team (I think they were from Heidelberg) in about 1980. We actually had a pretty good team and played the Germans following victories over Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk but, whether it was complacency on our part or something else, we played terribly that day against a very direct and physical team. Frankly we were were lucky to get the win, as I recall, and may have benefitted from local refereeing.

And who can forget (although it is certainly worth trying to) playing out a 0-0 draw in a Sunday social match for the Bandits (a social team I had the dubious distinction of “organising”) circa 1990? An unwritten rule of social rugby back then was that neither team would kick for goal when awarded a penalty, but such was the dire nature of this particular match that both teams saw this as carte blanche to offend with impunity. Awful, awful game of rugby which, I seem to recall, the referee eventually cut short by 10 minutes just to bring the whole debacle to an end!

So, there you have it – a rather pointless (pun absolutely intended) trip down memory lane…

Total Flanker – the older I get, the better I was