It was a pleasure to again be asked to attend the Surrey Rugby Club finals day and to help present the trophies alongside Surrey Chairman John Raywood. The finals were held for the second year running at the extensive facilities of Esher RFC. The first match of the day saw Reigate RFC take on Merton RFC in the Surrey Bowl. Merton proved to be the more tenacious of the two teams and even after two of their players were sin binned managed to come out convincing winners by 12 points to 3. They also had one of their highly vocal off the field officials Red carded – it clearly all goes on in South London!
The second match was a close and somewhat bad tempered affair in the Surrey Cup Shield between Battersea Ironsides and Camberley. Battersea arrived fresh from a victorious outing at Twickenham the day before where they won the RFU Junior Vase. Clearly this South London team have great strength in depth as a quite different team was fielded for this encounter with Camberley and they come out on top in this tussle with an eventual score line of 26 points to 20.
The highlight of the day was of course the Incentive FM Surrey Cup final between Guildford RFC and KCS Old Boys, which proved to be another close encounter with much pride at stake. Very much a game of two halves, KCS were 19-0 up at half time having crossed the line to score three times. The appreciative crowd were in for a roller coaster second half however, as Guilford clocked up the points including a converted penalty try at the death to draw 19-19. An unusual occurrence, as extra time was called for to settle this clash of the Surrey RFU giants – after 8 minutes of extra time Guildford Captain Jarred Adam converted a penalty from 45 metres to seal the win.
