RC Zug vs RC Winterthur

Final Score: RC Zug 24 – RC Winterthur 35

*Please first read the review of the St Gallen tournament from july for some background information regarding our newly formed friendship with Winterthur.

A few days before the match we received an email from Winterthur asking for the match to be made one hour earlier as they had a friendly game afterwards with RC Lichtenstein. They also invited us to bring a bigger squad with the idea that some Zug players could play in their friendly.

What I got from the email was “We have a huge squad now enough to play two games”…………I was not wrong.

We arrived at Winterthur with only 16 players, three of which were already injured. On the plus side, the weather was good and the pitch looked great.

The game started well with Zug starting to rack up the points with great kicks from Little Antoine and Bogdan. Winterthur came back hard, but we finished the first half with a reasonably good lead. Even though we were having problems in the scrum, we were in a good position to win the match.

 

The second half though was a different matter. Cracks started to show in our team in all areas. As Winterthur started to gain more points we began arguing amongst ourselves. Negativity is contagious and before we knew it Winterthur were ahead. Then disaster struck, Dani ruptured his collateral ligament in his knee (he will not be able to play rugby for the rest of the year).

At this point Winterthur started making substitutions. Five players with fresh legs just ran rings round us. We finished the last few moments of the game with only 14 players.

When we came back to the changing rooms after the match there was a crate of beer waiting for us. I would like to point out that these were large bottles…..brilliant. After showering, we were taken to a BBQ area were we received some tasty chicken and a potato salad.

I must commend Winterthur for their line-outs. Very well organised and clearly they practice this a lot in training.

We would like to thank Winterthur for their hospitality and look forward to playing them again later on in the season.

RC Zug