You may have spotted on twitter, that I am coaching our companies Rugby League 9s team for the Corporate 9s competition here in Port Moresby.  Technically, it didn’t really start out as coaching, more like Derrick nominating me to be there.  Our resident Digicel Cup star Toua Kohu was really meant to be doing the coaching with me (as the resident couch-ref) throwing in my two toea.  As it turns out, Toua has been busy, #2 trainer Nou has been busy – he flits in and out, #3 trainer Boge has gone to a conference, and so I have been attempting to run drills and come up with plays and strategies.

Last night, my strategy was “get them going – then play catch with some young kids from Kone” – lol.  hehehe – it might have seemed that way, but honest, I was keeping an eye on everything happening on the field (if you can call the dustbowl, complete with rocks, glass, bits of metal etc – a field), and got the team doing some drills.

My biggest problem, is I can visualise what I need to get them to do – but since I haven’t played in such a long time, showing them how to do it is problematic.  Like, I called for two lines at each end of the marked out area – I got two lines – one behind the other.  I really wanted a row, maybe I need to speak excel: “two columns, two rows”.  I dunno.  The guys look at me, they must be thinking – what the bloody hell is the kiwi up to?

So last night I ran two rows passing drills, both with balls, running towards each other.  They needed to be able to stop the gap between the opposing players running towards them, time the pass so it didn’t hit the opposing players, and get through all the hands, as well as not hit ball to ball.  Spin around and do it again and again and again.  I am not sure if they were bored or not, but I was trying to create awareness and communication – something we lacked on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Xavier had befriended the bunch of kids from Kone, and he was running passing drills with them – bloody hell, good kid.

Another run on Thursday – and then it’s final throw of the dice this Saturday against the team from Digicel.  Win, and we are through to the finals, lose – and we go home with nothing.

better bloody win eh 🙂