NM 7's in Stavanger

That was just a pity to see that we were so few going to the Stavanger 7's. Last year, the bus was full of juniors, men and women. This year, only 5 men and slightly more girls were sitting in the BRK's bus. We do not have to forget our only junior, Alex, who made the trip to Stavanger.

The trip to Stavanger is quite long especially when you have to wait more than one hour to get the first ferry. Our two south-africans, Hanro Irving and Ian van Pølse were thinking really hard to find something to do. I guess it's worth to have twenty juniors in the bus than these two SA kids. After two hours, they were still struggling to find something stupid to do. They finally got to the point that they had to drink a whole bottle of Rhum to get their brains working. And actually, it worked. Ian van Pølse had a small knife and they decided to draw some tatoos on the bodies of everyone. The nicest tatoos were Stian's (a nice smiley) and Trine (a beautiful sun).

Next morning, Kjartan and Derek joined the five lonely players (Ian, Hanro, Stian, Jørn and Hervé) and we started the tournament with no reserve on the bench. The first game was against ECB which had already defeated BRK twice this year already. After the first half, the score was even with Bergen scoring first by Hanro Irving. However, ECB put some fresh legs at the beginning of the seconf half and that was sufficient to make the difference against a BRK team running out of steam. Final score was 27-5 to ECB and BRK needed a victory against SRK2 to qualify to the semi-final. BRK received the support of one more player, Christian, coming from Haugesund to play his last bit of rugby with BRK before travelling to Australia with his family. BRK won confortably over SRK2.

In the semi-final, against SRK, BRK played the same kind of game that the first one against ECB. The score was even at half-time with a kind of football-try by Hervé but BRK ran again out of stem in the second-half while SRK were using all the depth of their bench.

For the glory, BRK won the bronze final against a barbarian team with our junior to play the whole game and scoring his first points ever for BRK.

Thanks to the few boys who made the trip to Stavanger. We'll do better next year with hopefully a full squad of motivated players.

The team :

1. Stian Røstberg ©
2. Ian Irving
3. Derek Johnson
4. Hanro van Wyk
5. Hervé Socquet-Juglard
6. Kjartan Vik
7. Christian Dahl
8. Jørn Bjørdal