What I Done Did

So yesterday I played  match in Tokyo.  I wrote down my initial impressions of the match afterwards, and here they are:

The furthest I've been without using the bullet train, todays game was a twenty minute walk from Hodogaya station.  You can look up Hodogaya, because I'm having trouble pronouncing it, let alone writing.

They say the harshest critic is yourself.  This is rarely the case with most people I find, as everyone always looks for external mitigating factors that contribute to their lack of success.  These same people will, of course, congratulate themselves when success occurs.  I find myself being on both sides of this coin.  When success comes, it's all me.  When failure comes, it's all me too.

Today was certainly one for coin clips, and at first it fell very much on the negative side for me.  I didn't hit with authority, I only scored one try (taking my average to around 2.5 per game) and I missed a tackle, leading to a try.  Playing at full-back against a team that broke our line frequently, with a pack that lost every scrum and lineout, it was to be expected that I couldn't stop them all, but it's that mentality that pervades sport here; and in which sports are Japan genuinely world class?

I don't want to be a loser, even if I'm in a nation that's quite happy to be.

Of course absolute negativity serves no purpose, so as food for thought the previous leaves room for improvement.  Next week is a sevens tournament, and everything I lacked at full-back will need to be perfect.

I played at full-back, and despite two howlers early in the first (having the ball ripped by their number 8 when I was clean through (after bunker-busting three tackles) and not passing on another clean break for a certain try) my game picked up.  I was told their team liked to kick (hence why I was at full-back) but that threat never materialised (I assume the lie was purely ego-massage on my behalf).  Positives: I wasn't caught by the first or second tackler with ball in hand, all game.  Apart from one try, I did enough to stop everyone.  I scored a sneaky one on the blind side from a ball passed at the floor five feet in front of me.  I joined the line a bit and helped out.  I made lots of line breaks that started being converted in the second half.  Apart from the aforementioned two, I set our wingers up a number of times, and as I started trusting them and drawing defenders - at times lots of them - we made in-roads.

I was awarded man of the match by the opposition, which makes three in a row for the games I've played in Japan; but for all the good I still feel disappointed.  We won forty odd points to seventeen but our club acknowledged our no.7 as man of the match.  It's great the opposition found me to be intolerable - but a jury of my peers in my own club didn't see it the same.  That's extremely disappointing.  All the small malcontents, mistakes and disappointments have come together leaving me feeling rather annoyed with the result.  In this instance, the sum of the minor setbacks outweighs the greater body of positive good.