With the players back in training after a short break, and the trip to Worcester Warriors away next Saturday, we caught up with Head Coach Craig Newby ahead of the next block of games:
“We have a real clear focus that we will share with the group this week on how we’re going to attack this next block. We can still achieve what we need to – we’re not out of it, though time isn’t on our side and London Scottish didn’t do us any favours by beating Chinnor, but we’ve got some real clarity on what we want to try to achieve in this block. There’s still a chance – we’ve just got to keep trying to perform better on the field and that starts at training this week. We can’t rely on other factors – we’ve got to be better, we haven’t been good enough in a lot of situations. We can’t rely on luck. It’s nice to have a little bit and we probably have had the bounce of the ball a few times games and we’ve got to just try and be better. It’s that time of year when the grass is greener and the sun’s out for longer and there’s a lot of positivity around -we’re really looking forward to Worcester Warriors away next weekend. It’s one of those games – almost an iconic stadium, and a very proud club with some history that had a decent Spell in the Premiership. I’ve played against Worcester there in the Prem and we can’t wait for that. It’s quite an exciting time of year -sometimes you just need a break just to sort the learning, and reset your heads and everything else.
“I wanted a couple of things from the start of this season – I wanted people to support us and to be proud of us and I wanted the opposition to respect us and I would say that that’s happening. One of the goals which we can control is sometimes you’ve gotta be hard to beat before you can be good enough to win. We’ve been particularly hard to beat in some some games, and in those games where we didn’t perform as well at the end of the day – like Richmond away – but we were there for a long time until the ball bounced off Ed Timpson’s head and sort swung the momentum and then they were better than us. But that’s kind of our mindset really, trying to be hard to beat. Then, unfortunately you look back at the Nottingham game at home in Round 4 – that could’ve been the catalyst to kick start some wins if we’d pulled that one off. We haven’t been able to win despite a huge amount of effort. We’ve just come up short a number of times despite the work that’s been put in.
“For this next block, we’re actually not too bad for injuries. We will still have a few guys from Northampton Saints and Leicester Tigers available. There’s a deadline coming up where you can’t register more guys on loan so at some point any loan players we use have to have played for us before. We don’t anticipate any changes or anyone who we haven’t had. We work pretty hard on our relationships with Leicester and with Northampton to make sure that their players are getting a quality product when they’re here, and that they’re getting a benefit of playing for us and we get the benefit of their young talent so that’s certainly going to happen again. We’ve also been able to play a small part in the development of those loan players that have gone on to play for England U20s in their 6 Nations. Loans are a big part of getting people more game time and more game time means enjoyment and development, and getting towards where they want to be so it’s a big part of this club, and always has been.
We’re starting the process of retention and recruitment for next season, wherever we end up. There’s been discussion with the board around budget – the first question is what does the budget look like next year for either the Champ or National One – if there’s Championship it looks like this, if it’s National one it looks like looks like that. Then, what can we do with that money, what do we need that to progress with? I would ideally like to keep the majority of the squad together – a couple of guys will move on naturally, some guys will have deserved opportunities with other clubs and they will potentially move on. But I want to keep the whole squad, as much as I can, together. I’ve offered the players the opportunity to remain at Cambridge next year and that seems relatively positive at this stage. Then, obviously, once that’s done and their deadline’s elapsed, we’ll see what we’ve got and what we need”.