Touch rugby finals

I play 6-a-side touch rugby over the summer with the Austin rugby club. My team -- the Exiles -- is made up of players from the Austin rugby club, the Austin Huns, and a few expatriate kiwis. We finished each of the last 2 seasons in second place, losing to the Blues in the finals. Last season we lost in overtime. Tonight we played the semi-final and final matches to determine the 2008 champions.

In our first game we played the Golds. This team is comprised of mainly ARFC players. We beat the Gold pretty handily even with an 11 year old player, Patrick Medina, the son of our scrum half Rick Medina. An interesting side note -- Patrick almost scored a try but was touched in goal by ARFC lock Matt Fry. I hope Matt is proud of himself. He probably went home and kicked his dog.

The other semi-final match pitted the Blues against the Hawaiians. The Hawaiians were the odss on favorite, led by USA Eagle 7s fly-half Dallen Stanford. However, in a back and forth match that saw the lead change several times, the Blues came out on top. Mickey (?) paced the Blues with 3 long tries. Mikey is a former UT and Beavers 7s player. Mikey has tons of talent bt he gave up rugby due to recurring shoulder injuries. The Blues prevailed in overtime, setting the stage for a rematch of the 2006 and 2007 finals.

In the final match we took a 2-0 lead before giving up 2 tries. The Blues systematically worked the ball down field into our territory and then capitalized on our defensive mistakes. They actually went up 3-2 but we countered off a long risky football pass to the sidelines by yours truly. Just as it happened in 2007, we went into overtime under the lights at Burr field.

In touch rugby overtime is unlimited time sudden victory. The first team to score wins. Overtime begins with 6 players per side and then 1 player retires at each minute mark until each team only has three players. As you can imagine, playing 3 vs 3 rugby on a full sized rugby pitch is quite demanding. We felt that if we could make it through their initial onslaught we had a good chance since our team had a speed advantage. We played overtime mostly in our end. We made several mistakes and they kept us pinned. We stopped them right on the goal line on 8-9 occasions. I was the 3rd player to exit. About 2 minutes into the 3 vs 3 stage, Terrel Modkins took the outside corner and made a long break down the right sideline. Mikey took a good angle and nearly had him at the goal line, but when the dust settled Terrel had scored a 50m try and the Exiles had won their first touch championship 4-3 in overtime against the hated Blues.