PDF - Women's Rugby, Austria

WOMEN’S RUGBY AUSTRIA5‐0 lead at half time. In the second half, we were still struggling with their system and could not find a wayto cross the try line. Another Danish try put a 10‐0 on the board, but we did not give up. After a nicely runand successful passing play, we managed to score a try, and with a converted kick, started a 10‐7 race tocatch up. Unfortunately, that race began too late and time was against us so that was the final score. Forthe last game of the day team Austria came up against rugby nation Wales. Knowing their type of game(we played them at Rugby Rocks London a couple of weeks prior) our realistic goal for this game washaving fun and giving them a challenging and fun match. What a game it proved to be! We even managedto get dangerously close to out try line twice, which was more than a win for us! The scoreboard said 0‐42for Wales, but we enjoyed the game and could see the reality of the difference in experience between usand our wonderful opponent. We fought and played our hearts out and every single player enjoyed thatgame! Our coach enjoyed the fact that, as usual, we play a much more composed and organized gameversus stronger opponents but wished for us that we manage to play such organized rugby against weakerand less structured teams as well in order for us to enjoy those games more.On Sunday, our first opponent and final pool game was Bosnia Herzegovina. We had played them years agowhen we were still in Group B and at ENTC, but have not come across them on the pitch for a while. Ourprimary goal was to win this and keep our 4 th rank in the pool in order to stay in the race for top 5. The firstcouple of minutes of the game we had some ball handling challenges and cased many scrums with resultsin tiring our forwards and takes up valuable playing and scoring time. We went into half‐time with only 2tries against them, but were not satisfied at all with our performance. Knowing we need more points todefend our ranking, we pushed ourselves to do more and fight harder in the second half. VISUALISECATCHING THOSE BALLS AND MAKING THOSE DREAM PASES!! And it worked! Our hands caught everypass, and our legs were still speedy and we finished the match with a score of 44‐0. We had achieved ourfirst goal and started into the afternoon as 4 th in our pool ready to face Latvia in the cross‐games. The oneand only goal left for the afternoon was to fight and win 5 th place.Our cross‐game proved to be a real fight, as neither of the teams seemed to play offensively but only delayand defend. The game mainly consisted of scrums and line‐outs due to many ball handling errors from bothsides. Just before the half time call, we managed to pull ourselves together and put more and morepressure on the opposition. Following a quick all‐hands pass from one side of the field over to the other,the Latvians could not cover our wing and we touched down when the whistle blew. With a 5‐0 lead, wewent into halftime, discussing what we need to do in order to win this game. Motivated and with fullcommitment, we set ourselves up for kick‐off. A tackle was missed, and the opposition managed to breakthe line, followed by a long fast run over the whole field. Our sweeper started for a hard chase and got anamazing back‐tackle just in time to successfully prevent a try not even a meter from the try‐line. Nowhaving all determination possible in such a situation, team Austria turned the game around and scoredanother wing‐try against Latvia, to finish this fight with a 10‐0 victory.Winning this cross‐game put us into the plate final for rank 5. After Denmark had won their semi‐finalagainst Bulgaria, our last opponent of this tournament was clear, a rematch versus Denmark. We weredefinitely thirsty for revenge after the previous day’s loss!WOMEN’S RUGBY CENTER SCHÖNBRUNN – ZVR Zahl: 990707307Schönbrunner Schloss Strasse 52, 1130 Vienna, AustriaCell: +43 676 536 1971 / 43 676 536 1970