Charlie Amesbury’s postcard from the IRB Sevens 3

By Pawlo
February 11 2007

The last chance to catch up with Charlie Amesbury. He describes the final training day and team dinner before his focus moves completely to the challenge of the coming week-end……

“We had a bit of a lie in yesterday (Thursday) so didn’t have to go to breakfast until half past eight. Shabbs (Dom Shabbo, London Irish) and I actually overslept as he had set the alarm clock wrong so we got a bit of a ticking off. Last week we had a fine system in place whereby you got fined $15 if you were late or wore the wrong kit but I am pleased to say I didn’t get fined once! Our worst offender was our manager Terry Sands who got fined loads by the end of the week!

Then we had training at the Olympic Centre stadium again. It was a really good training session and everything is coming together really well. The guys are pretty confident going into this weekend and yesterday’s ‘punch word’ was trust. It is really building up between the players and making us a better team. After we had done all our warm down and while we were drinking our recovery drinks, we had what we call a ‘slave game’. Every couple of days we do a different game and the squad are divided into two teams – the Dogs and the Gil-bears. I am on the Dogs team and we are winning by a mile having won at rounders and target shooting. Yesterday’s game was to spin around a post ten times and then take a kick at goal with a football. It was so funny as everyone fell over. The worst was our coach Ben Ryan who headed off in completely the wrong direction! I completely spooned my attempt as I could hardly stand up.

Then it was back to the hotel for a quick lunch before we were given the afternoon off and went into San Diego. It was the first time I had seen the city and it is nice. Pretty much all the boys headed to Abercrombie and Fitch again and we spent about an hour shopping. Then we went to the zoo and did the whole touristy thing. It is the world’s largest zoo, apparently, and we went on the bus tour so we didn’t have to spend too much time walking around. Saw some great animals including tigers and great big apes.

We then met up with the management and had a team meal at a really nice Italian. The restaurant was like something out of the Godfather films but everyone was really friendly and the food was amazing. All of us were really hungry but luckily we were pre-warned about the size of the portions as the lasagnes were about a foot long. We only had about ten portions between 20 of us and were so full by the end, but it was really nice food and there was a good atmosphere.

When we got back to the hotel, Shabbs and I were pretty tired so we headed off straight to bed.

Today (Friday) we had our final captains run and a visit to the stadium before resting ahead of our first matches on Saturday.”


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