As the Cayman Rugby Football Union summer mixed touch rugby league – one of the most popular sporting leagues in the Cayman Islands – winds down, the 11th annual Hurricane 10s tournament kicked off in South Sound on Saturday.
Cayman’s rugby faithful have not enjoyed local full contact play since the John Gibson Hangover match earlier this summer, which featured rugby legend Doug Howlett.
While the Cayman Storm were lacking players and were forced to join forces with the Buccaneers, the Iguanas and the Pigs Trotters took the field with larger squads.
Rugby 10s does not provide all the contact and structure of the 15-a-side game – and is not as high scoring as the 7s game – and is played on a full pitch, 10 minutes each way and allows for rolling substitutions.
The Pigs Trotters, coming off a stellar 2014 15s season, swarmed their opposition with supreme numbers and made little work of the Iguanas and Buccaneers.
Despite some decent running from Niall O’Driscoll for the Iguanas and Joel Clark for the Buccaneers, neither team could withstand the onslaught of red shirts, and David Terry, James Waters, Edward Westin and James Geary all ran in points for the Pigs Trotters.
The Buccaneers were undone after a red card to Josh Clark for backchat to the referee left his side a man down for 15 minutes of the game and the Pigs Trotters ran in the points.
However, Josh Clark was back in action against the Iguanas in the day’s final game. While the Iguanas played with more structure, it was yet again the sniping runs of Joel Clark and David Clancy who took down the Iguanas to put the Buccaneers in second place on the day.
Round 2 of the 10s kicks off at 2 p.m. on Saturday at the South Sound rugby pitch.
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