Ow, My Brain

So I took a couple of knocks to the head in the game yesterday.

It was a relatively short-order affair, becoming known to me only days before the actual event.  It was, however, a lot of fun.  That being said, it was somewhat disheartening to see a few of the incidents that transpired on the pitch.

Immediately after the match I couldn't tell you how many I had scored, with that in mind I'll split the difference between the one I am certain of, and the five I could possible have, to give me a figure of four (sic).

Two minutes (quite literally) into the match, after a couple of rucks, I was given a crash ball (or a switch, who knows) with which I made fair yardage and gave a respectable off-load; for a further gain.  As I was on all fours looking towards the play (and getting up) one of the opposition took it upon himself to give me a knee to the back of the head.  We're not talking a tap, we're talking a sprinting knee to the back of the head.  As you may imagine, my brain rattled (it being the size of a pea inside a football sized vessel) and my head ached.  Bizarrely, this wasn't the event that took its toll.  I had a blinding headache thereafter, but I am quite sure I remember most of the events for the next ten minutes.

Our team didn't want to tackle, maybe because of the cold or the opposition being complete dicks.  At some stage (my timeline is mucked up because of their foul play) I had my opposite number (I was playing 12 and 13 for the whole match) in my face (or as I prefer to say: all up in my fizog) for some reason.  I can't remember why he was inches away from getting punched, but he was most certainly all up in the face.

At another point, I had the tackler lying on me, trying to wrench my non ball carrying arm from its socket.

Now, I do things when the referee can't see, but only to those who have done wrong unto me.  You will have to take my word for that.  This team deserved all the punches they got, and fifty more.

So the guy who was trying to maim me got a palm in the face and a small knock to the head as I got up.  This may or may not have been the guy who was 'all up in my face,' before or after this event.  Who knows.

Then, in a separate occurrence, me and a yellow player were chasing a ball, I knocked him out of the way as I dived on it, for a penalty to be awarded against me for getting the ball.  In Japan you're not allowed to compete in any situation.  Not in the defensive tackle situation, nor in the lineout.  They just don't like competition.

And the referee was a blatant racist.  Of the thirty penalties the referee gave away, two were for us.  Maybe three, if I'm generous.

So I ended up giving away dozens of penalties, one of which I will say was a fair cop.  The others were utter garbage.

It was such an untenable situation that our captain (or manager, I'm not sure which one) was yellow carded for a shoulder charge, after a penalty that shouldn't have been awarded.  Frustration was the name of the game.

The referee was awful, the opposition team was foul, the game was rather entertaining.

Unfortunately I can't remember the timeline, but I did score a few tries.  One was a cutout pass where the opposition player shot out of the line, giving me a massive gap to go through, beat a few defenders and scored.  This was from the ten metre line or so.

Another one came from inside our half, I got the ball, ran sideways far too much, broke a few tackles and scored.  As one of the guys said after, 'it would've looked good to take a photo with all the tacklers on the floor.'

The third try of possibly five or possibly one try(ies) had something happen.

I have a headache.

Being my own blog, it's all very egocentric and not a fair reflection on the other players (we did play quite well for small portions of the game) who did extremely well.  The Man of the Match award went to one of the new guys, who absolutely demolished their scrum (in all the scrums they were awarded, they only got clean ball twice, testament to our superiority).

All things considered, it was a fun game, and now a night has passed I can remember a fair amount of what happened (I think); just not the order in which is happened.

If this is your first time reading this blog, please don't take this psychotic rambling as my usual style; take, well all my other posts instead.