Bishops Cup 2011 – St. Gallen

We arrived in St Gallen on Saturday morning only to be greeted by terrible weather. Most people would say it was raining ‘cats & dogs’ but honestly it was more like ‘hippos & elephants’. At the arrival desk we inform the organizers that we only had 5 players (this was a 10’s tournament) but would still like to play and would just borrow a few players from other teams. They explained that a 3 teams had cancelled just the night before and therefore to save having problems with an odd number of teams they would take RC Zug out of the tournament but that we could act as roaming extra players for the other teams.

Due to the re-organizing of the tournament schedule the first set of morning games were cancelled. So between all the teams we organized a set of friendly games. Our first match was with Winterthur against a new Italian side (their name escapes me) which we won rather convincingly. Winterthur were very happy with our performance and wanted us to continue playing with them for the rest of the tournament. They renamed the team ‘WinterZug’ which was great.

Our next game was against Zurich Union. Again we won.

The rest of Saturday was spent playing for München, Neuchatel & Bern.

Saturday evening was great fun. St Gallen had a Canadian band playing pop/rock then followed by a DJ playing hip-hop. RC Luzern were dressed up like ladies (as per usual), Winterthur went for the Richard The Lion Heart/Crusades outfits, and I swear I saw Batman at some point during the night. I don’t remember a great deal, all I know was at some RC Zug was on the stage dancing like crazy.

Sunday morning while eating our breakfast we check the information board. WinterZug was in the quarter-finals!

Our next game was against the tournament favourites RC Varese who had won both their games on Saturday 68-0 & 38-0. We knew this was going to be a hard game if not impossible, but we just got on with it. The game ended 19-14 and Varese were clearly shocked that another team had even got some points against them. We felt a bit disappointed considering there was only one try between us. Varese went on to the finals. I am not sure if they won as we left just before the match started.

The best part of the tournament was playing with Winterthur. They are in the league below us but will be joining us in our league next season. We very much look forward to playing rugby with them next season.

In summary it was another great weekend of rugby. Thank-you to the organizers, we will see you next year!