Rugby à 7 à Jakarta

On this Saturday 18th February, Bandung Rams participated to a Rubgy 7 tournament in Jakarta, organized and mastered by the TNI Marine troopers.
8 teams filled up the forms and entered the competition during a wonderful sunny and hot day, which crucified the organisms.
Bandung Team was obviously not the favourite team of the bookmakers, and presented a composite team from 5 different nationalities: Indonesia, Papua, Malaisia, France, Australia.
With 4 training times in their feet, coach Florian didn’t have any great expectations, but just to do well, to play in team and more especially to show values as courage, opportunism and friendship.

The tournament started by an epic confrontation against the Jago Dulu, a team with a French DNA; and surprisingly for the commentators, Bandung Rams did well and spoke rugby fluently as they are playing together since years, and eventually won the pint of lager. Later, in a pub in Jakarta after a couple of beers, Florian will say “They show speed where I was expecting mistakes; they show good passes where I believed in slowness; they did braveheart where I was imagining another movie. That’s Rugby”. The next game versus Surabaya will confirm this first good impression by a large victory where even the old fellows did scores.
The last game of the morning was more difficult, but definitely a challenge against the archangels and the future winner of the competition: Komodo Jakarta, just coming back from an rugby expedition in Philippine. Later, outside the pitch, Florian will told us “These Komodo players are beefy like fat crocodiles and very strong to tackle when at full speed; our tactic was to make them going slow. Unfortunately, these guys are playing together since ages, and with the pepper of their giant Lomu-shape-Fiji n°8, it was impossible mission.” In fact, Rams did more than these comments, and scored the 2 first tries before to get tired and losing the game by 4 assists to 2.

Finally, the Rams finished 3rd of the competition, doing well, as well, all the afternoon and confirming a potential.

What a day.

This is Rugby.