Masters Launched in Arlecdon

On Saturday a contingent of 11 Crusaders Masters, helped to make up a combined team with North East Thunder, to travel to Arlecdon in West Cumbria. The purpose of the day was to dust off those boots and launch Masters Rugby League for the 2026 season.

Despite the sizeable journey everyone arrived in good order and after an obligatory look at impressive amount of artifacts inside the Arlecdon Rams club house, it was off to get ready for our first game, which was against Barrow Masters. However before a ball was passed in the Spirit of Masters our first candidate for Masters Comedy Moment came for Darren. Who, having left the changing room some 15 minutes earlier, suddenly realised he’d forgotten to put his shorts on! For those now mentally scarred by that image we can assure you all, that intimate body parts were secure in his Under Armour, he just neglected to put his Master’s red shorts on top!

Crusaders have been working on some structure in training and after a settling in period, the things we had been working on started to work. The team were much more controlled and made good yardage, our completion rate was also massively up. Defensively we struggled at times with the Gold Shorters with Tags, and we had to concede giving one of them Master of the Match, we actually wanted to give it to his tailor who did mighty fine job sowing them on, but Barrow wouldn’t reveal his details!!!!

The Barrow game also revealed another Master’s Comedy moment. After a decent return set from within our own half Ladel Foot Longden shaped himself up for the kick on the 5th! Head down, leg following through, BANG ….. and the ball sailed out on the full, over the outer fence, straight over road and eventually came to rest on a building site! Awesome!

Our next game immediately followed against Carlisle. This time our structure wasn’t as rigid which worked well in attack but had us back pedalling on a couple of occasions in defence.

There was much more flow to our attacking game in this one and we spread the ball well and had some good combinations going on. One combination that paid dividends was when, Scotland Masters Head Coach, Ian, popped out from dummy half and ran at a gap to offload to his Scotland Masters Captain,

Grant (guesting from Arlecdon), who took the ball the rest of the way for a try. There is slightly more to the superb try, but we didn’t want to encourage any more poetic licence than it’s already had. It’s gone from evading 1 tackler to 6 and a 20m run to almost 65! We’ll let it rest.

A mighty fine plate of sausage and chips was provided as a refuel by the brilliant Arlecdon staff.

Arlecdon had a trophy for each individual team’s Master of the Match. Ours went to Ben, very well deserved.

After the awards the raffle proved fruitful for Ladel Foot who bagged himself a free Mothers Day present, oops, we mean a bottle of Prosecco, sorry Longers!

Congratulations to our debutants, Mike, Ally and Domo who also pick up there heritage numbers.

Finally, the Breakfast Crew turned into the Curry Club for this one, due to the AGM. 7 of us descended on Amantola in Richmond on our return for a very nice spread!

Crusaders Masters would like to thank our shirt sponsors Marstons, our polo sponsors Burties Hair Design, eCreative, Lighthouse Risk Management, iSecure Group and Top Third. We’d also like to thank our training apparel sponsors. The Hildyard Arms, 4 aces, Richie McGrath pre-training and breaking, JDN First Aid and AA First.