We'll be back next year

The belated conclusion to the exciting saga of this year's Cambridge town bumps. As you'll recall, yesterday we fell to Press, and today (well, Friday the 25th, I'll date-change the post but this is actually written in August) we went down again, to St Neots, for a net minus one on the week. That's maybe a touch unfortunate in our choice of surrounding crews, but such is life.

Today's plan was simple and the only one available to us: start fast and see if maybe we could sneak up on Press. It wasn't really viable, and although we got to 3/4 of a length at First Post that was the high point. The low point was St Neots not having much of a start: as it turned out, they were a decent quality crew capable of rowing well over the entire course. Which meant our plan of get-to-FP-and-or-die didn't work - they were still on station at that point - so we had to row to the Plough before they ground us down. They even neglected to do the thing visiting crews sometimes do and fail to take the corners.

And so, back to Peterhouse for some gin. I'll spare you the pictures of that. There are things to think about from this years campaign: most notably I think we should emphasise rowing well over distance as opposed to the fly-and-die style we ended up adopting. It worked well last year, but didn't take down Tabs 2 (nor did Press, as it happened, and as I would have predicted). A shift of tactics on Thursday to a steady row over the course would likely have worked, and seen Press bumped by St Neots today; but we or perhaps I didn't even think of that beforehand.