Match Preview

Newbury Blues

v

Exeter Chiefs

So – what do we know about Newbury and the Blues then?

For a start, the town was founded after the Norman invasion in the eleventh century. Since then, the town has flourished due to the cloth trade and more recently due to being the world headquarters of Vodafone.

In the 1980s the town achieved fame due to the location of the Royal Air Force base on the edge of the town. More than the entire population of the town would protest outside the base and the news was regularly full of articles about the protesters. Today RAF Greenham Common has been closed and the runway broken up. Much of the area has been restored to heathland and little bunnies can be seen everywhere.

Newbury has many claims to fame. Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was born in Newbury on 9 May 1920. Possibly more exciting (I must get out more!) is the fact that Michael Bond, author/creator of Paddington Bear was born in Newbury on 13 January 1926. I’m sure that the fans travelling to see the match will be full of “very hard stares” for the Newbury Team!

This brings me, eventually, to the rugby!!

The ground lies about 120 miles from Exeter and, apart from Plymouth, Pirates and Launceston this will be the next best thing to a derby match. The club has an average gate of 595 this season (950 max) and the team have not had a win since 5 January. In fact, they have not had a game this month due to a) Nottingham having thrashed them out of the Trophy and b) Rotherham having postponed last week’s match due to their previously postponed Trophy 5^th round match.

The Blues played us at home in October and kept us down to one try. The final score being Chiefs 11, Blues 6.  The match seems to have gone down as well as a cup full of battery acid with most Chiefs supporters as Exeter looked unable to achieve much during most of the game and seemed to be without ideas to get past their defence. Luckily I missed the match so am not having nightmares ahead of Saturday’s game! Being annoyingly positive, I’ll finish with the old cliché - “It can only get better” so my prediction for this return match is a convincing bonus point win, say Newbury 8 Exeter 32.

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