YCAC Gents
All France (also known as les Grenouilles, i.e. Frogs) were gathering over several months the finest mousquetaires from the “le monde francophone de Tokyo” for their flagship fixture against “les Gentilhommes de YCAC” – the mainly anglophone RosBifs, AussieBifs, KobeBifs, YankeeBifs etc – also known simply as “les Gents”.

This spirit of fraternité of les Grenouilles was being built up majestically as they were observed rendez-vous’ing “en pleine force” à La Gare JR Yamate 90 minutes before kick-off. At about this time most of the Gents were stumbling from their beds across Kanto in order to respond to Joe “You Know The Drill” Fisher’s summons for a full turnout to support the 1s (and to purchase their smart new Samurai armour for the battle that lay ahead).

Battle time arrived, along with Les Gents – or at least half of them. Fortunately a few warriors from the 1s were commandeered by Joe “You Know the Drill” Fisher to round out a starting line-up and all was ready. Or nearly. The referee blew the whistle for the toss, but where was Les Gents’ capitaine? There wasn’t one in sight! Inspiration seized les Gents at this critical moment, and this week’s stand-in reporter, Matt “le Posh Spice” Dimond, was cunningly selected as he (a) happening to be standing closest to the referee at the time and (b) conveniently shared his pré-nom with le capitaine des Grenouilles, a ruse designed to confuse the enemy and the ref.

The battle was joined in earnest as Les Grenouilles kicked off. The extensive warm-ups and mental preparations of les Grenouilles showed in the early phases – with their forwards showing a degree of fight and their backs showing a degree of flair, which resulted in them scoring first and converting. This early lead stoked the Gallic passion and some melodramatic off-the-ball incidents began to rankle les Gents, whose calm Samurai-clad composure was under threat. And so the battle continued to rage between the enemy lines, with Arnaud “le Mature Big Daddy” Terrien deep in passionate engagements with his compatriots – who were clearly targeting the French turncoat and were attempting to get him sent off, having seen through Arnaud’s derisive attempts at a posh English accent. Fortunately, before long Luke “le Nuke” Raimo welcomed himself home to Yamate by blasting his way through the ranks of les Grenouilles from his temporary strategic lair in the centres, feeding off Rich “Catwalk” Watkins and Ben “le Mellow Fox” Duncan to allow les Gents to bring the scores to égalité. Shortly after, Aran “Le Two Inches” Delaney joined his compatriot on the try list, leading to a respectable halftime lead for Les Gents.

Halftime came, and with it reinforcements of different shapes and sizes, including the heartening sight of Steve “le Big Cuzzy Bro” Gray taking the field. This enabled the momentum to swing towards les Gents as Brimman “le Big Brute” Frazer scored twice, displaying some great individual finishing on the back of strong forward surges. This capped a merveilleux day for le Big Contingent American, which scored all of Les Gens’ tries – and emphasized the fact that, regardless of the Continental pretensions of Monsieur Obama and no matter how many Statues de Liberté with which les Grenouilles might bribe the Americans, the underlying Franco-American rivalry remains as bitter as George le Bush Jr might himself have enjoyed. “Kill” Bill Baker added to the psychological tally, and lived up to his name, by winning out on his own violent confrontations with his opposite number.

Yet les Grenouilles were not finished and attempted to stage a revolution of the scoreline, responding with a pair of tries of their own in the second half, including one extraordinary one where a ball miraculously appeared on the tryline inside the corner flag while the Grenouille winger was being bundled into touch several metres away – is there budget for a video ref at Yamate? Beyond constant provocations and voodoo magic, the French tricks in the second half extended to swapping the ball for a rock, which ensured that both of the second half YCAC conversions fell dastardly short, and gave les Grenouilles a glimmer of hope, although in their passion (or perhaps in a spirit of égalité) they forgot to swap back the real ball for their own conversions as well!.

After several further scoring chances went begging for YCAC, the final whistle brought sweet, if not clinical, victory for les Gents over one of the strongest and most fired-up Grenouilles sides to visit YCAC in recent years, and capped another successful autumn season at Yamate.

Matt

YCAC 1st Team
Nobody ever promised that life would be fair and the weekend of YCAC prop Erich “Freezer” Friess proved this. It started with Freezer rocking up to the YCAC RAT on Friday night and finding out that the theme had been changed from “Christmas Party” to “A Tribute to the King” in order to celebrate the two tries that his fellow social director Mike “Masivo Big Daddy” King had scored the previous Sunday. Of course, the new theme of the evening only reinforced to Freezer his own bagel-eating status and it was no wonder that he spent the rest of Friday and all of Saturday drowning his sorrows. His weekend got even worse when Acorn took one look at him and promptly decided that they did not have any front-rowers and that uncontested scrums were the only way they could proceed. However, despite not having to use any energy pushing in the scrums, Freezer underwent another match where he came frustratingly close to scoring a try without quite managing it. The final blow came when he spent the aftermatch getting criticized by Simon “El Presidente” Ryan for telling boring stories and getting told he didn’t need to buy any chips because he was “fat enough already”. No-one has every accused the easy-going Freezer of being a workaholic but after a weekend like this one gets the feeling he was quite looking forward to getting into the office on Monday!

However, aside from Freezer’s annus horribilis (don’t get excited Fahy – this doesn’t mean what you think it means), the rest of the team enjoyed a productive day against Acorn. The main plunders were Brimman “Brutus” Frazer and Chris “The Alpha Male” Mander who scored a hat-trick of tries each. It is actually not that surprising that these two scored each scored a hat-trick for YCAC on the same day as they are almost inseparable. Indeed, after Steve “Heath” Rode and Alex “Jake” Benson dressed up as the cowboys from Brokeback Mountain at the RAT on Friday night an interesting conversation developed about which YCAC pairing would win a “Most Likely to Live Together on a Ranch” award. The front-runners would obviously be our beloved Captains of Vice (the Stallard-Fahys) but the two 24 year old Californians also have a fairly strong claim to the title and no-one would be surprised to hear an impassioned cry of “I wish I knew how to quit you” from one of these four at some stage during the season.

Finally, and sadly, this match served as a farewell for Grant “Mr. Normal” Thompson who will be moving with work to Shanghai at the end of the year. Thompson joined YCAC towards the end of the 2007/08 season and immediately made an impact by playing very strongly for Europe in that season’s Panty Shield match. He then enjoyed a very good 2008/09 season, cementing his position in the 1sts backline and winning “Most Improved Player” for the 1sts at the end of season awards. Thompson has also been a presence this season, playing in most of the 1sts matches and being part of the squad that won the GM Cup on 31 October. However, Thompson’s time at YCAC hasn’t been all beer and skittles – a locking crisis saw him moved temporarily into the engine room early in the 2008/09 season (a positional switch he has never forgiven his captain for); the 2008 Christmas RAT saw him stitched up with the worst outfit ever produced (clear plastic wrap + electrical tape); and (most famously) the 2008 Niigata trip saw a complete meltdown when the team’s choice of ‘eclectic’ aftermatch venues became too much and Thompson stormed off in a taxi, screaming (in English) to a bewildered taxi driver to take him to a “normal bar”! Grant – All the best mate. We hope that you find plenty of normal bars in Shanghai, we may be over at some stage to help you find a few others …

Joe

YCAC Gents
MIKE KING SCORES TWO TRIES!!!

In their quest to discover how to increase excitement and try-scoring, the IRB should make a detour to Yamate. The Captains of YCAC Gents and Itochu agreed to halves of 25 minutes which produced a try-feist of 84 points in the space of 50 minutes.

The first half was a real contest. Although they were no youngsters, Itochu had two or three class players who performed very well whilst their energy levels were high. Fortunately, the Gents had borrowed a couple of First Team wingers and Willy (2) and Kenji finished off dazzling inter-changes to see YCAC going into half-time with a narrow lead of 19-14.

Now there are some players who inspire fear in the opposition and give renewed courage to their own team. When you see a star player like Richie McCaw or Dan Carter stripping off his tracksuit at half-time, his team-mates are compelled to reach even greater levels of performance. There are some super-subs who have this awe-inspiring effect… and there are others that don’t…

And so the hearts of the Itochu players sunk to their boots as they saw 62 year old Mike “Doddy” Galbraith strip off to join them on the fields of Yamate to face his former friends from YCAC. Whether it was the dismay of Itochu or the galvanising effect on YCAC, the Gents scored 33 unanswered points during Doddy’s 20 minutes on the pitch. Most miraculous of all, Mike King finished off some electric back-play to score 2 tries. Arnaud also helped himself to a brace. The Itochu Captain realised his error and after substituting Doddy for the last 5 minutes, Itochu stormed back with 3 tries of their own to make it a nail-biting climax.

Special mentions go to Noah “Pass-A-Lot” Pflaum who demonstrated tremendous maturity in his distribution whilst jettisoning his early season nickname of “Crowbar”. And to JD Junior aka “The Tiger” who demonstrated a great sense of timing in arriving on Saturday so his father could be available for the game on Sunday.

Steve

YCAC 1st Team
The day after a wedding is never much fun, it’s even less fun when you arrive home at 10am after an all-night bender and have to play rugby in a few hours on a warm and muggy day. And so it was on a fine Sunday when the two young bucks of the team Noah “the New Crowbar” Pflaum and Brimmin “Brutus” Frazer rolled up to YCAC in a sickly state after celebrating the renewed vows of YCAC stars Dean “Fish” Stallard and Tristan “Inside Centre” Fahy the previous night.

With the start of the game having to be delayed as a result of Erich “Freezer” Friess requiring a crane to help him remove the new rugby jersey that he tried to squeeze into, there was concern that the team may have been underprepared at kick-off. Indeed, Freezer had only just come off the oxygen tank to take his place on the field after not being able to exhale for a full 15 minutes while he strutted around fooling himself that the jersey could actually fit him. Luckily, any concerns over the team’s preparation were dispelled with a fine team try almost immediately from kick off.

From that point on the YCAC forward pack totally dominated the opposition with the ever youthful Brendon “Cheese” Timmin’s having a storming game until he faked an injury to rest up for a night with his wife who had been out of the country for the past few months. Let’s hope Cheese’s war cry of “bend, bind and bulldoze – both on and off the field” didn’t cause the injuries off the field which he inflicted on the field against the Fellows. As a result of one of Cheese’s crunching hits, an early halftime was called with Morning Star/Zen Capital/Magellen Financial Planning/Herbert Lewis YCAC leading 35-0 to allow for yet another injured Fellow to be fixed up. By this time Brimmin and Noah were both suffering from cracking hangovers and looked worse than the guy being attended to by the paramedics.

There was no let-up in the second half and YCAC continued to pile on the points at will. The YCAC forward pack had so much sympathy for their opposites that they decided to make things easier by not contesting any rucks or mauls all the while standing out in the backline. The forwards could not be blamed for this tactic, particularly because tighthead prop and captain Freezer elected to spend the second spell at flyhalf during any play which wasn’t a scrum or lineout. When requested to stick to front row play, Freezer’s terse reply was “I’m the f*ckin captain here and I’ll stand where I f*cking well like” and that’s exactly what he did. An interesting array of moves were brought to the backs by Freezer including “drop the ball one metre out from a clear tryline”, “pass the ball to me and I’ll make sure it won’t get passed to anyone else” and the long lost “hospital pass” which he pulled off with remarkable execution.

Special mention must go to the replacements for Dean and Tristan (who were away celebrating their second honeymoon at a Hakone onsen) – 85 year old hooker Scott “Five Bellies” Sizemore and inside centre Yama Yamaguchi. Sizemore never took a step backwards and won plenty of opposition ball at scum time while Yama ran strong lines all day to put his outside backs into space. Finally, a mention needs to go to Noah who pulled off an individual match haul of 33 points despite not remembering a single minute of the game once he had sobered up.

Willie