London Welsh v Harlequins Preview

By Mark W-J
January 3 2013

The New Year at the Kassam kicks-off with the clash of the champions, as Championship winners London Welsh welcome the reigning Aviva Premiership champions, Harlequins. While we have no intention of regaining our crown for the foreseeable future, instead hoping to establish ourselves as a Premiership club, Quins are looking to create a dynasty not just domestically but in European club rugby.

In May last year, on the Saturday between the two legs of the Championship play-off final, Harlequins became only the third team, after Sale (2006) and Leicester (2009 & 2010) to win the Premiership final after finishing top of the league in the regular season. And seven months on, they again find themselves top of the pile, one point ahead of 2011 champions Saracens, with the Tigers a further point behind. Quins have won nine of their twelve Premiership matches to-date, and also top Pool 3 in the Heineken Cup with 19 points from a possible 20, a full ten points clear of second-placed Biarritz. With Connacht visiting The Stoop on Saturday week, our former local rivals will be confident of claiming a home quarter-final with one round of fixtures to spare, although they will remember a final round defeat in Galway last season which saw them eliminated in the pool stages. Although they have never reached the last four of the Heineken Cup, Quins were the first non-French club to win the second-tier competition - now called the Amlin Challenge Cup, then known as the European Shield - defeating Narbonne 42-33 at the Madejski in 2001: three years later they became the first team to win the competition twice, when they beat Montferrand 27-26 at the same venue, while they claimed an unprecedented third title in 2011, with a 19-18 victory over Stade Francais in Cardiff. Meanwhile, Quins’ youngsters won the ‘A’ League last month, beating Saracens Storm 37-12 in front of a crowd of over 4,000 at the Stoop.

This will be our fourth league meeting with Harlequins, and the first to be played away from the Stoop. When they were relegated to National One in 2005, we played our ‘home’ game in Twickenham in order to accommodate the bumper crowd, after over 10,000 people had attended the away game on Boxing Day. The attendance of 5,200 on Easter Saturday was our best home crowd in league rugby until we won promotion to the Premiership; indeed, it has only been bettered three times in our seven home games so far, with a reported 10,045 turning up for last Saturday’s local derby with Wasps. But the fact that this Sunday’s match will be our eighth home game of the season potentially gives us cause for concern with four months and nine league fixtures still to come - specifically, that we have to play six times away from home between now and the end of the season. We have, of course, won three of our six home games to-date, plus the win at Sale in September which is looking increasingly valuable given the failure of the two teams either side of us in the table - London Irish and Worcester - to win at Salford in the last couple of months. Yet two of our three remaining home games after this weekend are against the Sharks, on 17^th February, and the Warriors, on the final day.

Quins' Nick Evans
Second highest points scorer in the Premiership this season

Harlequins are not only the league leaders: they also boast the best attacking stats in terms of points (328) and tries (29), and the league’s best points difference (+85). They are the only team to have scored over 300 points - and therefore the only ones to average over 25 per game - but their defence has been suspect at times, with 243 conceded: only Wasps among the top eight sides have conceded more. Yet they have conceded only two tries in their last four games, with Worcester speedsters David Lemi and Errie Claassens both crossing in their side’s 22-19 defeat at the Stoop at the end of November, and have kept their line intact on six occasions, conceding fifteen tries in the other six games. Wasps, of course, scored five in the crazy 42-40 reverse at HQ on the opening day of the season, while Exeter matched that feat in their equally remarkable 42-28 victory over the champions at Sandy Park in early October. For the Welsh, try-scoring remains an issue and is in danger of becoming a serious problem. We haven’t scored a try for 313 minutes - over five hours of rugby - which represents the longest barren spell in the Premiership this season, although London Irish have themselves failed to cross the whitewash for 275 minutes and counting.

Ugo Monye's brace of tries helped Quins to
a 40-3 win against LW in September

Our trip to the Stoop back in September doesn’t exactly give us hope for this Sunday. Harlequins barely needed to break a sweat in the early evening sun to comprehensively swat the Welsh aside, scoring six tries in a thoroughly one-sided affair which finished 40-3. Former London Welsh loanee George Robson scored two of his team’s tries, and bagged another against Sale a week later, but no Quins forward has scored in their subsequent nine matches, although the pack did earn a penalty try at HQ last week, as they beat Irish 26-15 in front of 82,000 fans in ‘Big Match 5’. That early season defeat was a low watermark for us - we dropped to the bottom of the table for the first, but so far only, time - but bounced back the following week with a maiden Premiership victory over the Chiefs, swiftly followed by that vital win at Sale. All of the statistics suggest that Sunday will be another tough game, but we will be aware that all of the bottom four teams face top four opposition this weekend, with Worcester entertaining Leicester on Friday night, Irish visiting Gloucester on Saturday, and Saracens hosting their last ever match at Vicarage Road against Sale on Sunday.

We should also offer a warm welcome to our new Chief Executive, Tony Copsey, who has joined us from London Scottish this week. He began his post-playing career at Llanelli, where he had enjoyed much success as an uncompromising lock forward, in the role of Commercial Manager, before taking up the post of Managing Director at Harlequins in 2000. He held that post for seven years, before he moved to Wasps as CEO for a further two and a half years, subsequently developing his own consultancy basis, working with Scottish. Over the last fifteen years or so he has become one of the most respected administrators in the English game, yet as a player, it’s fair to say that Copsey wasn’t known for his brains. His international debut in 1992, after serving a residency period of six years, nearly resulted in a complete breakdown in diplomatic relations between Ireland and Wales, and many of his former teammates have filled page after page of their autobiographies recounting tales of his role as a good, old-fashioned ‘enforcer’ for club and country. He won 17 caps for his adopted country (he apparently has ‘Made in England’ tattooed on his posterior) and finished his professional playing career with three years at Saracens after a decade at Stradey. While at Quins, however, he made two appearances for London Welsh in 2002-03, firstly in a pre-season friendly at Staines, and then playing ten minutes as a replacement for Chad Eagle in a league game with Rotherham at ODP. The Titans had been denied promotion to the Premiership due to RFU and Premier Rugby shenanigans the previous season (plus ca change, and all that…) and they ran out 49-22 winners that afternoon, with Italian international Ramiro Pez converting all seven tries, including one from Alfie To’oala.

A warm welcome to new LW CEO
Tony Copsey

The Aviva Premiership takes a four week break after this weekend’s fixtures for two rounds each of pool games in firstly the European and then Anglo-Welsh cups, with the Welsh visiting the Stoop again on the last weekend of January. Quins have proved their strength-in-depth by winning all six ties in the two cup competitions, on top of their return of nine from twelve in the Premiership - that’s just three defeats in eighteen matches this season. They have given no impression that last season was a flash-in-the-pan - despite the aforementioned attacking prowess, they are prepared to grind out results, to win ugly, as they proved at Northampton a couple of weeks ago, and in Nick Evans they have one of the most reliable kickers in the game to keep the scoreboard ticking over even when the tries aren’t forthcoming. From a Welsh perspective, last weekend’s performance against Wasps was arguably our worst since our visit to the Stoop, with some pitiful defence contributing to at least three of the four tries conceded. What better opportunity to right those wrongs than the visit of the Premiership’s most potent attacking force?.

London Welsh v Harlequins Preview

Posted by: The Dragons' Den (IP Logged)

Date: 03/01/2013 10:22

What do you think? You can have your say by posting below.
If you do not already have an account Click here to Register.