Richie Williams has announced his side for the long trip to the The Mennaye. Cambridge have played at the ground before, beating previous incumbents Mount’s Bay by 28 points to 3 on Saturday 24th January 2009.
But this is the Blood & Sand’s first Championship visit to face the Cornish Pirates. They make the trip on the back of a heavy defeat to London Scottish at Ellgia Fields last week, where they ended up on the wrong end of 43-13 score line.
Here’s Richie:
“We need to be much better than we were last Saturday. There were some really good parts to the first half – we went in leading 13-0 – which is a position we haven’t been in for a long time this season – but we capitulated in the second half and made it far too easy for London Scottish to score.
“To concede 40 points in any half is really disappointing and not what we’re about as a group. There’s been a lot of soul searching from everybody who was involved last week – from the conversations I’ve had with a lot of people at the Club, it’s the worst people have felt at the end of any game so we’re responsible for that.
“What I know is we’ll work really hard this week to put those wrongs right – and there’s no better place to go to test ourselves than down to Cornwall for a Sunday afternoon kick off at the Mennaye. It’s a notoriously difficult place to go and win games of rugby – they’re a very proud bunch and really well coached. Alan Paver and Gavin Cattle have been there for a really long time both as players and coaches so we’ve got nothing but respect for what they’ve achieved and what they’ve done this season. For us, there’s that ‘fear factor’ going into this weekend because if we play as poorly as we did in that last quarter against London Scottish then we all know what’s going to happen.
Not that we need any extra motivation – for us it’s important that we go back to doing the simple things well. It’s going to be a big trip!”
“We picked up a couple more injuries last weekend – scrum half Sam Edwards is going to be out for a number of weeks after damaging his ankle. Lock Kieran Frost should be back for the trip to Caldy.
Winger Kwaku Asiedu has served his three match ban – we’ve missed his physicality and he’s back in the squad, as is Nahum Merrigan, who’s back from Bath to add his presence to our back row. He’s been one of our principle ball carriers – we’ve looked a different team when he’s played . Other than that we’re fairly similar to last week – and it’s a good opportunity for the boys to out their best foot forward after last week’s disappointing loss.”
CAMBRIDGE LINE UP
15. Joe Tarrant
14. Kwaku Asiedu
13. Sam Hanks
12. Matt Williams
11. Eli Caven
10. Steff James
9. Kieran Duffin
1. Jake Ellwood
2. Ben Brownlie
3. Billy Walker
4. George Bretag Norris ©
5. Gareth Baxter
6. Ben Adams
7. Jared Cardew
8. Nahum Merrigan
16. Archie Vanes
17. Huw Owen
18. Matt Collins
19 Noah Sloot
20 Morgan Veness
21 Lawrence Rayner
22 Tom Hoppe
23 Anthony Maka