Time to bring The Bottle home

As another year quickly slips before our hands, it is already February and for the Royal School of Mines it is one of the most important months of the year. It is the month when the Bottle Match falls and is a weekend looked forward to by all past and present Miners, but what is the Bottle Match and where did it start from?

For those not in the know, the Bottle Match is actually quite old…to be precise it is 109 years old this year and is the 2nd oldest university varsity match in the country after Oxbridge! The match is between the Royal School of Mines against their constant rivals in Cornwall, Camborne School of Mines. The match began in 1906 on 16th December 1907 with the two sides battling it out on the rugby field for respect and glory for their institution. It wasn’t until 1926 that the varsity match got its name, when some RSM students stole a 3 ft Bottle from a Bass Brewery lorry (showing students have always been badly behaved…in contrary to many newspapers’ views of students) and this was adorned with the two colleges’ crests and presented as a trophy for the winners of the match. The Bottle Match was born!

With time the match slowly started to incorporate more sports to show the diversity of the colleges with football, mens & ladies hockey, squash, and golf. There are trophies for all the sports ranging in age from the Sharpley Cup presented by a RSM alumnus in the 1950s for the Mens hockey winner to the Golders Cup that was presented by the Golders Association in the 1990s. This may seem like the match is stagnant but new sports are being added to the varsity match and helping to invigorate the atmosphere with new blood. Netball was added last year and this year Basketball is being trialled for the first time.

Last year was a disappointing year for the RSM with only the newly formed Netball team winning their game against CSM. Even the Royal School of Mines Rugby team that tends to always retain the Bottle, with them winning the bottle 12 out of 14 years that included a 10 year winning run from 1997-2006, went onto lose 13-0 in a bitter boggy game. However with last year in mind, all of the RSM’s teams have being training hard for the Bottle Match with some success stories throughout the season including ladies hockey coming second in their league and vying for promotion again. The football team making it all the way to their ULU division cup final. And finally the rugby team looking stronger, faster and more deadly than ever before (I’m sure Martin Johnson will enforce the England rugby squad to watch the Bottle Match for tactics and inspiration before their crunch game against France that day). So we look forward to the weekend when over 180 players will compete, more than 200 supporters will attend and hopefully the chant “Oh RSM” will be resounding well into the night at Metric.