The Men’s first recently played their first BUC’s tournament of the year, currently undefeated in the league, 9 of SUWPC’s finest made it to the GL leisure centre, Gloucester to fulfil sponsors contracts, sign memorabilia and play some polo. The following is an account of the day, special mention goes to Jason’s woman who gave up her time to transport the team…. though I imagine it was her pleasure.

GAME NO 1: Plymouth

With time looking a bit tight on the drive up we arrived at the pool and helpfully left Robin to park the Multipla somewhere by himself… great team spirit. Getting changed was followed by the usual fight through hordes of beautiful women to our V.I.P seats at the top of the grandstand. Due to a serious thermocline in the pool it was significantly hotter at the top of the pool and this somewhat affected Horlock’s ability to understand the tactics laid out by our esteemed leader. None the less the important players such as Charlie and Jason got the message and we started the first match well. Divall and Glanville each popped away a clean one and Charlie slammed in a hatrick.  The following quarters went much the same with goals from all players apart from Drew… yeah that’s right even Robin scored after a cheeky change of goalie to conserve energy. Unfortunately Plymouth did put 3 past us, but realistically we owned them [1] and the game ended 22-3.

GAME NO 2 : UWE

With just the 9 players and missing many of our big hitters such as the Hogg, Andrea and the terrible Tim’s we were concerned about how the game would go against what looked to be a physical UWE side. However myself and Drew remained optimistic and went for a celebratory pint which we downloaded off google images during our long tour of ASDA in search of the fresh pasta that few employees appeared capable of finding

The first quarter was tough, UWE posted an early goal and we responded with nothing leaving us 1-0 down at the break. However we (Charlie) responded well with a couple of goals and together with myself and Jason pulled us back into the lead. The sweepstakes I had going with Perry, Drew and the president for top amateur were looking good with only Divall making into the list of scorers for the rest of the game. It is certainly worth noting here that Robin played an outstanding game as usual and really saved us from many a UWE attack to finish the game at 8-3. Also as much as Charlie and Jason did most of the dirty work  with Charlie scoring “more than the other team” in every game as he helpfully pointed out (Biggest boy), they were well back up with excellent play from the core of the team in both attack and defence showing the other universities it’s about quality not just quantity.

GAME NO 3: Exeter

With just one games rest between UWE and Exeter the team tried to take on fluids which quickly evaporated in the troposphere. Exeter seemed like our greatest opponents having recently lost to them at an away game we knew we had to come out fighting. Unfortunately I do not have a score sheet to allow me to recall exactly what happened but here are a few highlights. Robin ended up in a penalty situation against Exeter’s team (literally the one player that makes their team function) and saved it like a boss. This demoralised there team almost to the same extent as having him sent out in the 3rd quarter. We were already 6 -3 up at this point. Those that hadn’t scored yet fired in some goals with Drew finally finding the back of the net.
However most impressive of all was Divall’s halfway-line glory strike, the location of which has been highlighted for clarity on all of the images. He said to me quitely afterwards that he thought it would be good to show the younger lads that how it was done back in the day. Fair play, more of that to come hopefully as Divall gets back to form.

[1] ‘Owned’ : Verb,
‘To absolutely destroy the self confidence of a team and render them incapeable of appearing in public for at least a month’

Man of the match and dick of the day not awarded due to great team effort ❤