International rugby

On the first of May P's club was invited to play in the local tournament in a town near Perpignan, in the south of France, a place that most people here consider as "north Catalunya" as the cultural links joining this regions are very ancient indeed. In fact the road signs in that area of France have the names of villages written both in French and Catalan and the local flag of Perpignan is the same as the Catalan flag, red and yellow.
So we woke up very early that day and drove all the way there in order to see our guys play.
Last year it was a bit of a traumatic experience for them as they were all under 10 years old and it was their first experience playing against children that live rugby since birth, as the game is particularly big in the region of a country of rugby lovers. By comparison rugby is an unknown and minority sport in Spain.
The French rules for kids playing are also slightly different and they're allow to kick the ball forward while that isn't allowed in Spain until they're older. On top of that they played rougher than Spanish kids and our guys were literally black and blue and that was also under their black and blue uniforms!! There were literally blood, sweat and tears (and almost a broken nose), all for us as we didn't win one match, I don't even think we managed a draw.
(you can check my entry here in my blog of when we went last year and our kids were trashed by the very good and tiny rugby players)

Anyway... probably because last year we had such trashing, most parents decided to stay at home to enjoy the fiesta day of Labour Day and when we arrived to the club we had just enough kids to form one team with one for changes. Hardly encouraging considering that most French teams have at least 2 full teams which give them plenty of fresh players.

The matchs were very short and there were one after the other, all morning and after an hour break for lunch they continued all afternoon. Our guys fought very bravely, as you can see in this close up with Patxi and Angel faces:
And I lost count of how many games we won as what counted was that they were giving the French teams a totally unexpected great run for their money!

Sant Cugat did'n win the tournament, nor was the last team; we finished somewhere in the middle which is a great improvement considering how strong the French teams are.

There was only one incident just before lunch time in which one of our best runner was badly hurt and we later learnt that he actually suffered a fracture on his left arm. But this was outside the field while Felipe was trying to show his dad how he tackle one of the big guys just minutes before, he went too far and tackle his unsuspecting dad, who promptly felt on top of him resulting in the fractured arm.
We then lost a player because he has to be taken to hospital by a French ambulance, luckily for the parents one of the drivers was local and spoke Catalan, because before the ambulance arrived I was translating to the doctor using my bad French and English.

That left our kids without a valuable player but also with no spares so by then end of the afternoon they were exhausted. Even then they really did it magnificently and actually won a cup to be kept at the club.

Here some more pictures:

The happiest coach in town Ricardo:

The hero of the day, Borja, the kid who scored most of our tries.