Page 83 - All Shapes & Zebras From Treorchy

night, scrolling through the fixture list, assessing each upcoming team, the must-win games gathering like black, ominous clouds upon the rugby horizon. I’d go to work, continued with family life, put on a brave face - but all the while the self-doubts and thoughts gnawed away at me.
Thankfully – mercifully – the worm turned and our fortunes changed. After being winless until October, we went unbeaten for 9 games, from November until late February. How would I have felt if we had gone all season without a win? It sounds farfetched, but it certainly does happen for some teams in amateur rugby. Leagues have an uncanny way of sorting themselves out and you’ll often find a side which becomes the league’s ‘whipping boys’: teams that find themselves on the wrong end of eye-watering, cricket-like scores on a regular basis. May the rugby-gods bless those players. It’s easy enough to play for a side that is riding rough shod through the league, hammering team after team. I’ve been fortunate to have been part of a team that has done that too and again, when teams do that it should be commended and celebrated. But it does take a certain type of personality and stoicism to turn up week in, week out, knowing – sometimes literally – that you will get beaten, and often beaten heavily. And that is a measure of an honest player or team: they turn up and front up. They endure, of their own, free volition.
ALL SHAPES & ZEBRAS FROM TREORCHY 81