Hartpury head coach Mark Cornwell says Chinnor will be a “tough challenge” as the Championship side look to get back to winning ways.
The Gloucestershire side lost to Bedford 38-30 last weekend, after two successive wins over Cornish Pirates and Worcester Warriors.
Cornwell said on this Saturday’s fixture, “Chinnor’s a different challenge completely to Bedford; we didn’t play particularly well at home. When we played here, we drew 17-17, and it was probably one of our worst performances of the season. They’ve won one this season, and they had a good win against Coventry, coming back from 19-0 down, which is tough to do, so it will be a tough challenge.”
Cornwell also looked on how “emotional” the Worcester game was, as his side won 28-25. Cornwell went on to say that “There was a big emotional drive that game for us because of the situation of Worcester just being sort of 30 minutes down the road; we probably had over 2,000 people here for that game. Most of them, or a lot of them, were Worcester supporters, and emotionally, people see Worcester as a potential top side in this league, challenging to get back in the prem, and it drove the boys. I said to them this morning, ‘You can gain performance from, you know, the way you emotionally approached the game,’ and they were buzzing about that game, you know; they played very well.”
The former Gloucester Rugby player called the league schedule challenging, as he looked at the bodies their side will have on Saturday. “We’ve got to look at who’s on feet, who’s taking knocks because we did take a few bumps Saturday (against Bedford). Because of the demands of the Championship there are more games this year; there are blocks of six games, seven games on the bounce without a rest. We’ve got to manage the players’ time on their feet, and with the limited number of players that you’ve got in the squad, you have to give them the time off they need as well as time on the pitch so you can gain as much from not actually training and maybe giving them some video or some footage to look at, a bit of analysis, and a bit of rest after a challenging day at the weekend. So you’ve got to manage how many sessions you actually throw out the boys, how much time you’ll feed out after three tough games.”
Hartpury have finished sixth and fifth over the last two seasons, with many looking at them as surprise promotion contenders, but Cornwell talked down the promotion chat by stating “The last two seasons we finished sixth and fifth something like that, maybe you could say that we’ve overachieved at times but the squad are very tight, they’re driven, you know the realistic goal for us is to win the championship and be that level of competition that players need to progress from the Bucs university side which play every Wednesday to stepping up to playing Premiership with other academies or the Premiership academies and moving in Premiership clubs so it’s a stepping stone and it’s a very good level and we’re the only university in the country that have that so it’s our selling point.”
