Barnes 2^nd XV 0 – 10 Shelford Development Squad W/O 

News of Shelford’s meteoric rise up the table has clearly reached Barnes who have forfeited this Saturdays league encounter with the mighty development squad. Either that or they knew they could not possibly compete with the awesome array of Christmas Jumpers that the squad have procured from various charity outlets across the East of England.

Christmas Jumpers night is not dead though as the boys will be meeting at Henrys in town at 7:30pm with the whip for a festive Mulled wine and ‘Mincer’ Pie (also known as a James Briggs). The upshot is that we are now in third place in the league (and if Henley beat Readingensians on Saturday, 1 point behind 2nd). January and February will be crunch time for the squad with  a string of tough league and cup matches in the offing (see list below).

If we can get to the end of February undefeated then we will be in a very strong position to secure a top 2 or 3 finish in the league and gain a third successive promotion. At the bottom of the page is the current try scoring table, worryingly for the rest of the back line 9 and 10 feature in the top 4!  

  Thursday night training was full of drama as in blizzard conditions it emerged that two cars had been broken into. In an effort to audition for America’s Dumbest Criminals (clue in the fact that he was in the wrong continent to audition in the first place) the thief then skidded trying to make his getaway in his postman pat van and put his car in the field. All credit to him as he asked his victims to give him a push, nothing gets past Rory ‘Columbo’ Finlayson though and he rang one of the stolen phones to find it was metres from the perps van. As ‘Columbo’ rambled on incoherently hoping to illicit a confession, with little success, the police were called.  

At this point the red mist descended on Tim ‘Dirty Harry’ White and he threatened to pistol whip the pikey till he fessed! Fortunately the “good” (real) cop arrived before Chalkie could finish his bad cop routine; clearly Chalkie was hoping to take out his frustrations of not being able to complete Call of Duty level 10 on this light fingered villain! Anyway the suspect is still banged up and Chalkie has cooled off, after a return to the PS3. Most of the valuables were luckily recovered although we will need to have a whip round to help out with the cost of the damage on Saturday  night.  An eventful end to 2009! Looking forward to more fun and even some rugby in 2010.  

Development Squad Top Try Scorers Christmas 2009: 

Charlie Baker                     7

Tim Mann                            6

Anver Alexander             5

Andy Daly                           5

John Naylor                        4

James Worthington        4

Rupert Ransom                 3

Sam Meylend                    3

Chris Yeomans                  3

James Briggs                      2

Gaz Mclaughlin                 2

Tim White                           2

Tom Docherty                   2

Max Johnson                     2

Charlie Worthington      2

Adam Hodgkisson           1

Ed Stowe                             1

Matt Gregerson                1

Ben Seymour                     1

Oli Hardwick                      1