London Irish v London Welsh Pre-season Fixture Preview

It might not be as iconic as the Wimbledon fortnight or the Glastonbury weekend, but in the modern era the middle weekend of August denotes the start of the rugby season, marked by the now traditional meeting of the Exiles, London Irish and London Welsh, at Sunbury.  This year the game moves from Friday night to 3-00pm on Saturday at the ‘traditional’ home of London Irish at The Avenue in Sunbury.

It’s a mark of the success of London Irish in recent seasons that qualification for the Heineken Cup is now the minimum expectation of the club’s supporters.  They achieved that objective last season, finishing sixth in the Aviva Premiership and securing their place inEurope’s elite competition for the fifth time in six seasons.  However, having reached the Heineken Cup semi-finals in 2008 and the Guinness Premiership final thirteen months later - losing by less than seven points to two of the giants of the professional era, Toulouse and Leicester - the club set standards which have proved almost impossible to maintain.  They began last season’s domestic campaign with six wins from seven games, also beatingMunster23-17 in the opening round of the Heineken Cup.  But the beginning of November brought an extended period of darkness, as Toby Booth’s men suffered ten consecutive defeats in all competitions.  By the end of the league season, they had recorded eleven wins and eleven defeats - in other words, just five wins from the last fifteen rounds in just over five months.

This summer has seen a fairly high turnover of players at Sunbury, with several established Premiership stars moving on to pastures new, including Ryan Lamb (Northampton), Steffon Armitage (Toulon), and the Samoan triumvirate of Seilala Mapusua (Kubota Spears, Japan), Elvis Sevali’i (Bourgoin) and George Stowers (Ospreys).  Prop James Tideswell and scrum-half Ben Stevenson have joined Welsh on a full-time basis after having made loan appearances over the past couple of years, while Jon Fisher, who scored our only try in last year’s meeting, and Jamie Lennard have both made the short trip up the M1 to Bedford.  New arrivals include international centres Shontayne Hape (Bath) and Joe Ansbro (Northampton), Leeds’ former Quins & Bristol fly-half Adrian Jarvis, and Edinburgh scrum-half Ross Sampson, while just this week the club has announced the signing of England U20 Grand Slam winning captain Alex Gray from Newcastle.  Overall, however, you can’t help but feel that the roll-call of new arrivals is less impressive than the list of departures.

Gray joins a number of talented youngsters who are stepping up from the club’s academy.  At London Welsh we have been the beneficiaries of a dual-registration scheme with our neighbours which has seen Marcus Watson, Guy Armitage, Marland Yarde, Max Lahiff, Matt Garvey and Rob Herring wearing the famous scarlet jersey.  Watson and Herring - along with Sam Edgerley - have been released from the Irish academy this summer, but Armitage, Yarde (both 19), Lahiff (20) and lock Kieran Low (21) will all be DR’d with Welsh for the coming season.  They will join eleven other newcomers - plus two further loanees - as Lyn Jones tries to mould a promotion-winning team from the squad which he inherited this summer.  Lyn is our fourth Head Coach in as many years, and it seems strange that the club allowed Phil Greening and Mike Friday to proceed with recruitment before the end of last season before the mutual agreement to part company was announced less than three weeks after the play-off defeat to the Pirates.

Finally, a word of warning to those supporters travelling to Sunbury on Saturday.  The game coincides with Sunbury Regatta, which is the big social event in the town’s calendar.  It’s also the second biggest regatta on theThamesin terms of the number of races, although rather than the sleek streamlined vessels you associate with Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, Sunbury is home to skiffs, punts and dongolas.  The main event takes place on Rivermead Island, which is about ¾ of a mile walk from London Irish, but on-street parking in the village, in and around the lower end of The Avenue, will be at a premium come Saturday afternoon.  Crowds for the last two Friday night matches suggest that there will be a hell of a lot of vehicles parked within walking distance of the ground at least an hour before kick-off, and because the regatta is - naturally - river-based, the pubs along Thames Street will also be heaving and unlikely to be serving food.  So get there early - it’s been a long summer and you need to get in training for the coming season.