Knights hoping for strong start

The early close season saw Clive Griffiths decide to move on and take up an offer he felt he could not refuse under his old buddy Mike Ruddock, now at the helm of Premiership side Worcester Warriors.

It meant that the Knights were without a director of rugby at a critical time, and the shortlist of available candidates short as most had already sorted their futures out.

But the waiting turned out to be good – one of Griffiths’ Welsh contemporaries, Lynn Howells, became available as the Edinburgh franchise was bought in by the Scottish Union and the Knights were quick to snap him up.

Over the summer, new backs’ coach, Justin Bishop, who joined the club from London Irish, has done a marvellous job alongside fitness and conditioning coach Jeff Evans, in getting the playing squad through pre-season and into a position where they were able to play competitively against Newcastle and Leeds in warm-up games on the past two Sunday’s.

The Knights squad is now a professional one in every sense. There are 33 players on a full time basis plus scrum-half Dave Scully who is part time but able to fit his day time training around his “proper” job.

Gone are the evening sessions of last year where it was ever more difficult to merge the needs of the full and parttime players. Training is now a day time programme, with diet and fluid intake controlled, and the difference in fitness levels has been remarkable.

The issue of how to employ 34 such players regularly has been solved by completely changing our approach to second team rugby.

Instead of Saturday games the Knights A team will now largely play their fixtures on Monday nights.

This will give those who did not play on the Saturday, or who spent the afternoon on the bench, game time on Monday and chance to impress the management with next Saturday in mind. The A team has a full-time coach in the newly-appointed Steve Salvin, and he also now has responsibilities for setting up an Academy structure within the club that will provide a performance pathway for all younger players with talent to develop their skills. The better of those will also get games in the A team alongside the professional players, experience that should be invaluable.

The Monday night A team games start next week (September 3) at Castle Park when Northampton are the visitors. Kick-off is at 7.30pm, entrance is free, and we do hope that the town’s rugby community will see this as an alternative to the TV and get out there and enjoy rugby camaraderie.

The Knights’ National League campaign opens with a trip to Coventry, over whom they did the double last season.

The starting line up will be interesting. From a squad deprived only of Ben Jones and Dan Storey through injury, Lynn has several difficult choices to make in key positions.

How many of the new players (seven in all) will make the starting line-up?

Arguably they were brought in to improve the squad, and all have shown their plus sides in pre-season games. But so have existing players, fired by the obvious competition for places.

The Knights first home game is on Saturday week against Cornish All Blacks. Once again all home games will kick-off at 2.30pm.