Men's BUCs: Lent term

Following on from our wins in Michaelmas, our goal was to continue that record and earn promotion and a spot at outdoor nationals. We beat Leicester 13-5 in the wind and (some) snow to solidify our spot at the top of the league. Subsequent victories over Oxford Brookes (walkover) and Loughborough 3 (15-4) confirmed our first place league finish with 6 wins out of 6.

In the cup, we had a rematch against UEA. Similar to the first time we played them, they matched us for the first few points but then we pulled away to make it 15-5. The final cup game (actually called a semifinal, and means that the winner goes to Div 3 nationals to play in a ten team tournament. Don’t worry about it too much.) was against Loughborough 2. We could see from the warm-up that they were a fairly big athletic side but we expected that our experience would be enough to carry us through. And while this did turn out to be true, it was a far closer match than we were anticipating. It was a bit of a strange match. They would make pretty basic errors like not mark the first cut yet dealt with the wind and our zone like it was no problem. We built up a bit of a lead and then they pulled it back to within one at 9-8. It wasn’t exactly a panic situation as we weren’t playing particularly well and we could definitely step it up, but it was definitely a bit worrying. We started to play closer to our level and ended up winning 15-10. It was nice to have a BUCS match this year where we were pushed.

It’s a bit hard to predict what will happen going into Nationals, partially because we never got our whole first team out to a BUCS game. Looking back at prior years’ results and the other teams who qualified for Div 3, I expect that we’ll have some good close games at nationals.