A Monmouth Rugby Football Club player tries to escape a pack of opposing players. (Photo by Dustin Racioppi; click to enlarge)
By DUSTIN RACIOPPI
Kate Kelly, a thin-framed woman who’s maybe five-feet six-inches, showed up at Lincroft’s Thompson Park Saturday with a bandaged left hand and waited patiently on the sideline for the men to finish playing the first of two matches.
When asked about her bum hand, Kelly, the Red Bank-based Monmouth Rugby Club‘s 24-year-old vice president, shrugged nonchalantly and pointed out that she dislocated her thumb last week in a match.
“I’m still going to play,” she said.
Monmouth trounced the Village Lions 57-0 on Saturday. (Photo by Dustin Racioppi; click to enlarge)
Thumbs are pretty important components to a game that requires a lot of picking up and running with a large, oddly-shaped ball, not to mention the fierce mob of opponents trying to steal it back from you. They’re not all that critical, though, in the minds of rugby players, Kelly explained.
“It’s nothing too serious,” she said of her injury. “But you kind of consider a lot of things not too serious after you’ve been playing awhile.”
The younger crowd, including Kelly, make rugby their hobby, and suffer the side effects of jarring hits and rattling tackles on the pitch. Others get to a certain point where their bodies say it’s time to find a less-intense way to recreate. One day each year, Monmouth Day, those two cohorts join together at Thompson Park with the goal of sending the other team home losers.
In recent years that hasn’t been the case. But in the first match on Saturday, the men’s “A” side team put a drubbing on Manhattan’s Village Lions, 57-0. Not a bad start to a day purposed for celebration, said Rob Shope.
“It’s Monmouth Day. Everybody’s fired up about it,” he said. “We lost the last couple Monmouth Days, so we really needed this one.”
The men’s “B” squad fell to the Lions, 35-5, in the second match. In the final match, Kelly’s ladies came back strong and put away Elizabeth U-19 (their original opponents, the Rochester Renegades, canceled), 50-0.
Club president Rob Morello said the men’s team had been practicing twice a week since January in preparation for Saturday’s matches. Earlier this season, the club switched to a higher division, so there was something to prove, both on the pitch and to the fans, he said.
“It feels pretty good. We had a couple good games like that,” he said. “For our home games, we show up pretty hard.”
Despite one of the Lions’ players lying flat on his back for about two minutes toward the end of the match, it was a pretty tame affair, in terms of bodily damage, at least.
“That’s always a good game, when there’s no injuries,” Shope said.
Had there been, Shope put it in the same perspective as Kelly.
“Just the normal stuff — getting banged up, getting tired,” he said. “That’s normal for a rugby game.
But, he added, “Everybody’s smiling at the end.”
