CRAIG NEWBY SETS OUT HIS GOALS FOR THE NEW NATIONAL ONE SEASON…
OFF SEASON…
I had a really good break. I needed it. I spent the first three weeks at home and then the last three weeks in New Zealand with my family which was cool. So I got right away from it. We had reviewed and previewed a little bit around the season coming and the last season before we had finished the season, so I didn’t have as much to do, which was good. I needed the time off and we were pretty good with the players as well, the ones we retained and the new guys. I’ve not put too much mental pressure on them in the off-season because it’s a long season and we want to train and play pretty hard. I had a really good one. We’re ready to go now. We’re back into it. We had some testing last week – the boys were in for one or two evenings. Then we went away to Olney Rugby Club for the weekend, just to get our rugby stuff underway and touch a ball again and share some time together, on the river and in a gazebo, and 35 degree heat with a few beers with the new guys and old guys. So that was a cool start to the season and now the rugby starts, the proper rugby, the nuts and bolts of what we want to do and how we’re going to do it.
GOALS…
It’s a tough league, the draw’s come out, and it’s a tough league from start to finish. There’s some teams with aspirations, five new teams in the league, from us and Scottish coming down to teams like Camborne and Bury and Sheffield coming up. It’s tough. It’s awesome. We’ve got Rosslyn Park and Rams and Sale and Leeds. That’s a goal – can we prepare our team the best we can? We want to be pretty deliberate with how pre season looks. That’s a goal, being prepared for the first match, which is Moseley away. We’re building the outreach within our academy, so that’s another goal. We’ve got nine senior academy guys with us this year, which is six more than we had last year. The goal is to get them into a position to play. Stefan Leibenberg is going to be helping in that transition space, turning these young men into proper men. We want to try and make them play for Cambridge and allow them to be fully-fledged senior players, so there’s another goal around that. We’re hopefully under a little less pressure than we were last year in the Champ. So we want our identity to really shine and we want our supporters to see that identity and how we are going to play.
Last year, one of our goals was around fight and commitment to each other and standards and those things will remain but hopefully we can show a little bit more of our flair and our ambition with one metre more time than we had last year. We had just had no time. We were under pressure the whole time. So that’s a goal, is to let our identity come out and express ourselves. And hopefully the supporters that are watching it are proud, so that’s similar to last year. We’re going to try and show what we’ve got this year a little bit more often. So that’s a goal. Now, in terms of winning, as everyone wants to win, we want to have one win. Where that comes, we didn’t get one last year, so if we can get to one, then it’s like cricket. You get one, you get two. So we’re going to be pretty simple. And we just want to enjoy each game and be competitive. And we want to win those games.
We want to win as many games as we possibly can and put ourselves in the right position at key points of the season – after Block One, which is seven games, then at Christmas. Then after Block 3 midway through February into March, we want to be in a position to compete for the title. That’s the goal – to be in a position to compete for the title. If we get on a roll, things go our way and we get a bit of luck and injuries and so forth and we can win the league then that will also be a goal. But we’re to be realistic and we’re one of 10, 12 teams that probably could sit there and do the same thing. So first and foremost around winning is we want to just tick off the first one and build some momentum. I’d love to at the end of the season be in the top half, I think that would be a successful season for us after where we come from last year.
Without the fully professional sides from the Champ, we’ll be on a different ‘playing field’ this season — we’ll be playing plumbers and accountants, who have got commitments and they’re sacrificing at the start and end of each day just to get to Saturday. We’ve got a few guys, Ben Adams, Billy Walker, Ruaridh Dawson, a couple of those guys haven’t been very successful with Cambridge. Ben was part of the team that got promoted to Championship and he remembers those days fondly, but over the last three years it’s shaped way more character in those guys and I know they’re looking forward to another season and just seeing what this one holds for us. Like I said, we had a good weekend away so it started in the right note. We’ve got a four-week block now, then we’ve got a week off, and then we’re into Havant and Colchester at home and then Bedford away in our pre-season matches so they’ll give us a good indication of where we’re at.
PLAYERS…
I guess key ones that the people will know would be Billy Walker, Jake McKay, Ben Adams from the forward pack, Chris Mills, Ruaridh Dawson, Jasper Sorrell, Eli Caven. Those guys were regulars in our Champ team, so we’re lucky to have them back and they’re going to form some strong leadership around bringing in the new guys. Ethan Thorne is around as well and then guys like Matt Dawson coming back after a year or two away, coming back to the Club. And then we’ve got plenty of new guys,there’s plenty of good Champ standard players that we’ve been lucky to get and they want to play. Their motivation is to play 25 games a year.. So Callum Smyth from Worcester, Jake Parkinson from Ampthill , Joe Hill from Bedford, those three stand out. They just want to play. They’re talented players, they’re hungry and they just want to play and that’s the opportunity that we’ve provided for them this year. And then we’ve got a handful of guys that have been in National One. Prop Sam Turner from Clifton, fly half Luke Bouchier and wing Bradley McKenna from Leicester Lions. So we’ve got a couple of guys that have been in the league and they know the territory. And Ben Gibson from Ulster. So, yeah, we’ve got a good sprinkling of new guys to add to that core group of important men that we’ve retained. We can use loans and dual registrations, as we have done before, the similar rules as last year in the Champ. We have got good relationships with Northampton Saints and Leicester Tigers in particular, so we’ll utilise those in spaces that we need. And it’s good for those clubs to get guys good footy and you know, they’re going to come to us and get good training and then good footy on Saturday, so we’ll use that space as often as we can or when we need.
PRESSURE…
I think the weight’s different this year in terms of how hard it’s pressing down on people’s shoulders. I think last year was probably more so because we knew how significant the challenge was going to be. No matter how much we put into it, it was always going to be an uphill battle. This year the weight of pressure probably shifts a little bit to the performance side because now there’s probably, rightly or wrongly, and whether we like it or not, there’s probably an expectation of now winning more games than we’ll lose. There’ll be teams in our league, in National One, they’ll be feeling that exact same pressure. They know who they are, they’ll be under the same pressures, they’ll be realistic but they’ll be aspirational and that’s what we are. We understand the level of competition and what it’s going to take -looking closely at Rotherham last year, how hard they had to fight for everything and it came down to the last weekend. So we’ll be in a position to be one of those teams competing on paper, but paper doesn’t mean anything. It’s performances. And probably that’s a little bit of the pressure that’s going to come on us, how we deal with that and how we can get to that first win and build confidence and It could be one of those magic rides where we just snowball, or it could just be an absolute grind. We get through this year intact, and then next year it’s the real stepping stone. You also look at teams that have been successful in any level, whether it’s the World Cup or it’s National 3. It’s teams that have been together for a significant amount of time and win together. And hopefully, like I said, the biggest thing we want the fans to see and the supporters to see is that identity that we’re going to play with – hopefully it can come through and we can, we can show ourselves and express ourselves this year.