Rugby

¡Hola a todos!

It's been a while since my last entry as I have been quite busy. I've joined the Universidad de Cantabria Rugby team and they are a good bunch of lads. Actually only about 40% of the team are students: the rest are just blokes from throughout the region.

We had two training sessions last week which went pretty well. Then this weekend we had a training camp about 40 minutes to the east of Santander in a town bordering the Basque Country called Santoña. The training was lead by Roland Biron, coach of the French Second Division tem Tarbes and two other French gentlemen (Maurice and Pascal) who play for/coach amateur teams in that area.

The morning of the Saturday consisting of a training and gameplan theory presentation, pretty advanced and very interesting. Then we headed out to the field to do some basic skills and fitness. After dinner we then took the cars over to our home ground to watch the Cantabria youth team play a match before our own game against Gijón of the Asturias region. I came on for 15 to 20 minutes in the second half and played some as back ro, some as second row. Not very happy about second row I must say but any game time is good for me at the moment as I am rather out of shape after doing no exercise whatsoever in the summer.

We right royally stuffed them all game until the last 5 minutes when they scored two tries to take it the final score to about 56-24. We headed back to the hostel for dinner and then the inevitable celebrations after. We had a bar crawl around Santoña which was absolutely awesome. Good banter, good music (surprisingly) and I think we got home at about 8. I say I think as my memory of the last hour or so is (as usual) a tad blurred.

After two hours slept we were cruelly woken up to be put through a beastly fitness session through what I can honestly say was one of the worst hangovers I've had in a long time. I wasn't alone but that's hardly any comfort, is it? Nevertheless great weekend and thanks to Msr. Biron and Co. for all the work they put in.

The photo above is the view from outside the youth hostel with myself and my mate Hugo (the only other Erasmus student in the team) posing Sunday morning. We both have nicknames in the team: Hugo is Franchute which is like the Spanish version of "frog" and mine is Guiri which is the general slang term for foreigner as (very strangely) the Spanish don't seem to have a derogatory term for the English. I haven't told them I have relatives in Gibraltar or else they'd quickly find one!

The nicknames are obviously good-humoured and just for a laugh. But my word do they swear a lot. Fair enough, so do British lads in any sports team, but even the coaches do and in fact so to daytime TV presenters! Leads me to the conclusion that swearing out here is not as grave as in Blighty. They have a rather interesting phrase that the rugger lads say quite often, which translates literally as "I poo on God". You won't be catching me saying that as I think that's slightly over the top!