Pirates are Ready for The Off

After an unusually long pre-season, the Cornish Pirates start their competitive rugby with a Championship Cup match away this Saturday versus London Scottish (ko 3pm).

Reaching the semi-final stage of the competition last season, the Pirates will be keen to do well in this campaign, so getting off to an encouraging start is very much the focus and aim. Having not beaten London Scottish at the Richmond Athletic since September 2011, there is also incentive aplenty to hopefully reverse such a run of defeats.

Saturday’s contest will mark long-serving prop Jack Andrew’s 150th appearance for the Pirates. He is selected in a team of familiar faces, where only lock Fa’atiga Lemalu is lined up to make his first competitive match in the club’s colours. Other new arrivals, named on the bench, are props Hayden King and Sam Rodman, scrum-half Rhodri Davies, and centre Shae Tucker.

Keen for the rugby action to begin, Cornish Pirates’ Director of Rugby Chris Stirling has said:

After a long and challenging pre-season we are really looking for to this weekend. The Cup is important to us, to not only strive for the later stages but to hopefully aim for the final and try to win it.

The competition also enables us to try different things during the season and to provide important game time for some of the squad, plus with a lack of pre-season fixtures the opening Cup matches gives an opportunity for us to get things right ahead of the league campaign. There are three or four players carrying just niggling injuries, so apart from the long term injured most will get an opportunity to feature.

As for London Scottish, they have had a couple of pre-season games, but we don’t know much about them. Our focus will be on us and how we do things, and if we are good enough, then great.