The BIRFC Women endured a frustrating day in Potsdam, suffering a couple of narrow defeats in crucial games and slipping to 6th place in the standings.

The group draw saw Irish - together with their SG partners BSC - scheduled to take on FC St. Paul and old rivals Adler Kiel as well as reigning champions and series leaders USV Potsdam. Despite heading into the first game against Kiel with confidence, Irish struggled to maintain their rhythm and gave the ball away repeatedly as they entered into the opposition redzone. Kiel on the other hand while they didnt create much, defended well and attacked superbly from turnover ball to tie the game on 3 tries each (Hirschberg, Slobin and Ruf on debut), a single conversion for Kiel being the difference at the final whistle - Irish losing 15-17.

Knowing a further loss could see the team end bottom of the group the players rallied and played a solid fast attacking game against an intelligent but outmatched St. Pauli outfit, who failed to cope with the SGs attacking system. Again though, defensive question remarks remained with missed tackles leading to breakaway tries for the Hamburg outfit. Nonetheless, the SGB pulled through to post a 20-10 win, with tries coming from Carron (another debutant), a brace from Denin and Hirschberg.

It was clear that the 3rd game would be a difficult proposition against a very strong Potsdam team, fired up by their home crowd. In the end, although Irish worked hard Potsdam were able to ease away, racking up several tries to put 41 past the SG. Noteworthy though was a superb team try in response, finished by Dennin, with no less than 5 offloads in the build up, rightly greated by cheers and applause from the watching spectators.

This left the team heading to a 5th place playoff against none other than last months playoff opponents, Hamburger RC. With knocks and injuries now starting to take their toll, a number of players were playing out of position, and it showed. Hamburg found that they had enough pace to beat a tiring Irish defence and ruthlessly took advantage of this, pulling away to defeat the SG 12-26, (Ruf and Slobin), and leaving Irish/BSC taking home 6th place out of 8 teams.

Despite the mixed results on the pitch the team was able to blood a number of debutants, including 3 rookies and can take heart from their good attacking play. The coaching team and players were all in agreement that lessons could be learned and an improved performance could rightly be expected in 4 weeks time at the next tournament in Wilmersdorf!