By The Prof
April 18 2003

Another weekend with no first team game and this time there was no internationals, seconds, U21, Ladies or Amateur games to watch either. Luckily there were Quins teams playing – a Harlequins Gentlemen side who played against a Sevenoaks President’s XV and a youth/U19 side that played against a Sevenoaks Academy side.

Both games were played to raise funds for three charities – the Richard Langhorn Trust, the Bali Bombing Fund and the Nick Duncombe Fund – and well over £5000 was raised on the day through programme sales, a raffle and an auction.

The weather and setting were both lovely and the welcome from the Sevenoaks fans was equally warm. One positive from the afternoon is that both Quins sides won, the U19s won 17-27 (or was it 17-29?) with Tom Guest, Simon Love (2) (is he related to Johnny Love?), Mike Brown, Sam Hocking and Adrian Jarvis all scoring.

This was just the warm up for the Sevenoaks President’s XV v Harlequins Gentlemen XV, It’s difficult to know exactly who was on each side, Jason Leonard was supposed to kick the game off but didn’t show and neither did people like Brian Moore, Will Carling etc. From the current team Ben Gollings played for Sevenoaks on the same side as his brother while on the Harlequins side players such as Peter Winterbottom, Paul ‘Tommy’ Turner, Mike Friday (we think) and Lawrence Dallaglio was seen in a Quins’ shirt for the first time much to the delight of the ladies present. There were other players that looked familiar but a mixture of the previous night, the Shepherd Neame and the age of the players made it a tad tricky to put names to faces.

The game itself was very exciting, a proper charity match – Micky Skinner stood in for Jase and took the kick off. Peter Winterbottom still looked like a fine player and made some good breaks from the back row. The home side took obvious pleasure in tackling Lol whenever possible. Turner had played for his club side – Old Albanians – the day before but still played well. The Quins right wing was extremely fast, I am not sure who he was but he wouldn’t have looked out of place on the field for the seconds. The final score was something like 52-67 with Quins coming out the victors.

All in all it was a fine day out, the barbecue was tasty as was the beer, Skinner performed the most intimidating auction I have ever heard, Emily won two prizes in the raffle and James won one (no surprise there!) and RobShew was lifted into the bar up some huge steps by Lol and friends. I know we have had problems with Dallaglio in the past but he was very friendly and even waited around to help RobShew out of the bar again – perhaps this nicer side of Lol was caused by the nice coloured shirt he was wearing – sadly we are unlikely to see him wearing it again.

On the playing front it looks like Bruce Starr is fit again and Alex Codling and Laurent Gomez are only a week or so away from playing again. Pat Sanderson is coming on well too and might be available for the second half of May. However it looks like Woody wont be playing for Quins again which is a great shame.

Finally we are having a home game – there are a few Quins players that haven’t played there yet because we haven’t had a first team home game for more than ten weeks! I hope you will all remember how to find your way there so we can cheer our side to its first home win since the tragic demise of Nicky Duncombe.