New Season - New Dawn for the Warriors?

By Silver Warrior
September 1 2013

With the new season just around the corner I’m anxious to see how we will get on this season. With all of the changes on and off the field I expect it to be a tough ride for players and supporters alike.

Having been to all of the pre-season games I can definitely see some improvements in our ball handing and most of all at the breakdown where we seem to be a lot quicker getting there than we have done in the past few seasons.

We still seem to be having a few discipline problems as we found out against Ospreys in the last few minutes of play when we went down to 14. I’m hoping that we can play a lot more games with 15 than we did last season as I believe that was one of our biggest downfalls trying to defend for a good part of the game with a man missing.

When we were at Ospreys their supporters kept commenting on how good our defence which was very refreshing to hear.

The players communication on the pitch seems to be a lot better and hopefully we will be able to get our line out functioning this season with the new players we have. I also believe that Mike Williams will be a player to watch out for. He is very young but I have been impressed with what I have seen so far.

Paul Warwick’s kick to touch was good for the Rotherham game but I am concerned with the distance element – whether that will come as the season progresses we will have to see. Ignacio Mieres seems to have settled in to life at the Warriors and will be interested to see if Dean Ryan will be tempted to play both at the same time.

The new scrum laws will make the first few games interesting to see how many referee’s actually look for the straight feed as I’m finding with the SH refs they don’t seem to be pulling it up very much. I also think that this will make the scrum more competitive instead of just having the ‘shove on’ which we seemed to suffer against a lot during last season.

For our first game we have Tigers away. I’m not expecting to get much from this game though I think we will give them a good run for their money as they do seem to start the season off a little slowly.

I look forward to being on the terraces at Tigers to cheer on the boys and the new captain as we go into the new season apprehensive but excited.