London Welsh v London Wasps Preview

In years to come, 2012 will be remembered as the greatest year in British sporting history.  The London Olympics rightly overshadowed all other achievements, including the first British winner of the Tour de France, a British male winning a Grand Slam tennis title for the first time in 76 years, Wales’ third Grand Slam in eight seasons, and London Welsh winning promotion to the Aviva Premiership.

If anyone had suggested, twelve months ago, that London Welsh would be playing league rugby against London Wasps then you’d probably have got shorter odds on the double European and six-time league champions being relegated to the Championship than the Exiles gaining admission to the elite.  But even then, the prospect of Wasps facing the drop was a lot less likely last Christmas than it was to become by Easter - at the halfway-stage of the 2011-12 season they had four wins and four bonus points, the same as we’ve managed in our first season, and were nine points clear of Newcastle.  Yet the second half of the season saw the Falcons close the gap, and Wasps were ultimately saved by just a single point, although their total of 33 points from 22 games was their lowest since bonus points were introduced in the 2000-01 campaign.  Their 25-18 victory over Sale last weekend has moved them up to 7^th place in the table on 28 points, and with the prospect of welcoming eighth-placed Bath to Adams Park seven days after their local derby at the Kassam, they must be confident of matching last season’s total in the opening week of the New Year.

There have been two key factors behind Wasps’ success this season.  The first is their home form: they have a perfect record of five wins from five at Wycombe, although they did contrive to lose a ‘home’ game against Harlequins at Twickenham on the opening day of the season, a result which confounded even Mulder & Scully.  And secondly, bonus points: only Quins and Leicester can match their three try-bonuses, and Bath are the only team to have collected as many losing bonus points (five).  As a consequence, they have taken at least a point from ten of their eleven games, with the exception being a 24-6 defeat at Northampton at the end of September.  From a Welsh point of view, after being paired with Quins and Leicester in the space of five days at the start of the season, we’ve taken at least a point from eight of our last nine games, with four wins and four losing bonus points.  The one gap in that record was at Wycombe on 28^th October, when we threw away a losing bonus from the very last play, falling to a 29-19 defeat after being penalised when trying to run the ball out of defence instead of kicking the ball into the stands and settling for a seven point margin.  But while Wasps’ home form has been almost exemplary, they are one of four teams who have still not won on their travels.  Having said that, all of the bottom four clubs have visited Wycombe in the opening half of the season, so after their trip to Oxford on Saturday they have to visit Reading, Salford and Worcester between now and the beginning of May, and with their tails up and a mid-table position giving them a decent springboard for the New Year you wouldn’t bet against them righting that particular statistic.

 

Canadian International Phil MacKenzie
One of our two try scorers against Wasps in October 

Our more pressing problem at the moment is a lack of tries.  We haven’t touched-down in the league for 233 minutes, since David Rose awarded us a penalty try in the 7^th minute of our game at Northampton last month, and in the game before that we only managed a last-minute interception from Nick Scott to beat Bath at Oxford.  The last time we crossed twice in one game was in that defeat at Wycombe two months ago, when Phil MacKenzie and Franck Montanella scored, albeit after Wasps had already bagged a bonus point for four tries of their own.  Wingers Tom Varndell and Christian Wade scored two apiece that afternoon, and they are the Premiership’s top scorers with nine and five respectively; they have scored as many tries between them as London Welsh as a team.  Until last weekend, we had also conceded more tries to opposition wingers than any other club - eleven of the 25 tries that have been scored against Welsh have been claimed by the opposition wingers; only London Irish, with 12 from 27, are more susceptible to the pace of the opposition’s wide men.

Wasps' Christian Wade takes some stopping!

This weekend’s game will be the first time that we have kicked-off a Premiership match at 3pm on a Saturday.  The last time we played a league fixture at the ‘traditional’ time was the final play-off pool match against Nottingham on 21^st April - and that was only because the laws dictated that all of the final round of fixtures had to be played at the same time.  There was some controversy over the kick-off time for Saturday’s game, because we had originally scheduled it for Friday evening, only for Wasps to request an adjournment to allow them time to recover from last Sunday afternoon’s game with Sale.  The Sharks, however, will be entertaining Worcester on Friday night, and we twice had a five-day turnaround in the opening four rounds, playing Leicester on Sunday 2^nd September and Harlequins on Friday 7^th, followed by Exeter on Sunday 16^th and Sale on Friday 21^st.  But the apparently random scheduling can’t all be blamed upon television - in the Championship there have been two weekends when only Jersey’s fixture has been scheduled for the Saturday afternoon, and one weekend when there were no Saturday matches at all, with Doncaster, Newcastle and Plymouth opting to lay on the Friday night, while Bristol, Pirates and Leeds scheduled their games for the Sunday.  In some cases, of course, this is due to the problems of ground-sharing, to which we are now subject.  It was interesting to note the ‘concerns’ of certain Oxford United fans after their game was postponed last week, apparently due to London Welsh trashing the pitch rather than the weather conditions; while Wycombe Wanderers’ game on the same afternoon was also called-off, London Irish were able to play at the Madejski, which suggests that the semi-synthetic pitch installed at Reading may be the way forward for shared stadia.

In recent years we have benefitted from a number of loan-players from Wasps, and have also provided a permanent home to many of those who have found themselves surplus to requirements at Wycombe and - before that - Shepherds Bush/ Acton.  In the early days of professionalism there were players of ‘greater experience’ who felt that moving into full-time rugby in the latter stages of their playing career was impractical, and we were able to offer them a good level of semi-pro sport locally.  Back at the turn of the century (which sounds like the days of knickerbockers and two points for a try, but is only twelve years ago) we were more than happy to welcome the likes of Gary Holmes, Paddy Dunston, Simon Mitchell, Florent Rossigneux and the legendary Buster White to Old Deer Park, while Rob Henderson used to aid his rehabilitation from injury in the company of a packet of Silk Cut behind the posts, while encouraging to his former colleagues.  More recently we’ve welcomed a pair of locks in Matt Corker - who made a solitary appearance off the bench for Wasps at Worcester in March 2006 - and Martin Purdy, who originally signed a part-time Wasps contract from school which enabled him to win a Cambridge Blue before joining full-time in 2003.  In the backs, Seb Jewell made just two Premiership appearances as a replacement in 2010-11 after joining from Quins’ Academy and spending most of the year on-loan at Esher, while Tom Voyce enjoyed arguably his best years at Wycombe, from 2003-09.

Varndell in defence against Tom Voyce

At the midway stage of the season, we have accumulated half of the 40 points which are said to be required to ensure safety from relegation.  Of course that stat is completely meaningless, dependent as it is on other clubs’ performances, but we can take some comfort from the fact that Sale’s total of seven points from eleven games is the same as Leeds had managed at the same stage two years ago, and - as mentioned previously - four fewer than the Falcons had collected this time last year.  Wasps are looking up, with a Heineken Cup qualification a real target for them if they can build on their current position in 2013, but while the Kassam may not be a fortress in the vein of Welford Road (or Adams Park, for that matter), we have beaten all of the teams from sixth place down who have visited Oxford.  If we can continue that record on Saturday - and when Sale and Worcester visit later in the season - then our destiny will be in our own hands.

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