We played Grove Vets last night, all 17 broken, battered and belligerent old bar stewards of us bimbled onto the pitch at Oxford; creaking, whingeing and whining our way through the warm up. We spotted that we were outnumbered on the bench and that the opposition were looking far better than us for their age (I suspect that Grove maybe sponsored by L'Oreal).

And so it began; we started, they ran at us, we sort of got in their way, a lot, they eventually scored. We were quite muddy. This continued for a bit - luckily they were so well moisturised, that they kept spilling the ball forwards and Hippo bought us time by thwacking the ball into the tree line at every opportunity.

At some point in the first half we accidentally put a few passes together and unleashed our winger, who had the presence of mind to score; bless him. Hippo was so shocked that he lost a contact lens; which thankfully ate up another few crucial minutes to half time.

The second half was much the same, just with a different view (the sunset over Boars Hill was a dream). Where Grove were one dimensional and bluntly effective, we were wistful, complex, misunderstood beat poets in need of a warm cup of java and an exotic cigarette. That cheerful little winger of ours popped over again, as did one of our centres and, despite converting no less than two out of three (that's a healthy 66% people), 'twas too little against the beer-bellied blunderbusses. They scored 8 tries, converting a meagre three (37.5% stats fans); so we had the moral victory there I think despite the final score being 46-19 in their favour.

The referee was Paul Roblin; what an elegant statesman of the game he is - anyone willing to come out to referee a bunch of cantankerous vets on a Wednesday night deserves a bloody medal.

The vets still appears to be a somewhat exclusive club, which it need not be - if you think you can be shirty, you've drifted over 35 and don't quite know how that happened, then you can join the vets team. See Marc Grant for details.

Dan Porter

Man of the Match - Hard tackling, hard running Chris Good
Honorable mentions - all the rest