Alton ladies had their first taste of a touch tournament on Saturday 24th March.
With a slightly smaller squad than we had hoped for team we headed off to Maidenhead RFC in our new shirts. The main aim of the day was to have fun. (When we saw the opposition we were not sure this would happen - Loughborough uni, Exeter uni etc.) After the initial shock to the system of playing against teams with England touch players in them we held our own pretty well.
Our defence was awesome. Unfortunately to win you have to score. Having achieved our first target of having fun, our afternoon target was to score a try! We did this and then played in the spoon final against Didcot. They were much more like us with a good mix of ages. However we were down to 7 players by this point and against their 14 it was tough. They could bring on a fresh team whenever they wanted to and we only had one spare player. We held them to a nil nil draw but then had to play extra time which in touch is called a drop off. This means every couple of minutes one player drops off the pitch until someone wins! Having already played for an hour and forty minutes now we had nothing left in the tank and when the opposition scored we were unable to respond.
This was a massive team effort from everyone and we left everything on the pitch. Well done Tina, Tracey, Amy, Ellen, Lou, Helen, Jacqui and Hannah.