All Saints 7’s Carnival

The day started with cloudy and rainy conditions at All Saints, not perfect for running rugby but the Somerset boys made do. Somerset College entered two U18 teams in the All Saints 7’s competition, the “Old Dogs” which comprised of graduating Seniors and the “Young Guns” current year 10 and 11 players.

During the Carnival the Old Dogs played matches against Trinity Lutheran College, Kings Christian College, All Saints and Marymount College. Throughout the day the team showed glimpses of running rugby, strong defensive efforts and accurate individual skills. However, all four of the games proved to be close encounters with strong opposition teams contesting the U18 division this year. It was fantastic to see the graduating Seniors display their skills learnt while at Somerset and play one more time in the College jersey prior to leaving in a couple of weeks.

The Young Guns played the first game against Miami, Somerset College and displayed some promising signs, ending the game with a 15 to 15 draw. We then went on to the second game, which was a better performance, with Riley scoring a hat trick of tries in a dominant performance against Kelvin Grove. Emmanuel College was the next opposition and being one of our APS rivals we knew we were in for a hard match. The first two games seemed to effect a number of players and the Young Guns went into the half time break trailing Emmanuel College.

The boys then showed courage and determination to make a comeback in the second half with the result being a draw and both teams scoring four tries a piece. The final game of the day was against Saint Stephens, which all the boys knew would another physical encounter and we knew the intensity needed to be lifted. Saint Stephens proved too good in the end for the Somerset boys with the ending result being four tries to three. Overall there are a lot of positives including individual performances by Rhian and Riley that we can take to the Canada tour and APS season next year.