Nottingham Preview

Nottingham, or Snotengaham as my history teacher delighted in telling us was its Saxon name mentioned in the Doomsday book, is a city famous for its lace, its Castle, the world famous goose fair, the oldest inn in Britain (Ye Olde trip to Jerusalem – well worth a visit) and Robin Hood (however much other places try to claim him!) In sporting terms Nottinghamshire has quite a good pedigree too, boasting 2 football teams, (Nottingham Forest winner of back to back European cups and Notts County – the oldest team in the league) a world class cricket ground in Trent Bridge, Nottingham Panthers ice hockey, the home of the Nottingham open tennis and the Robin Hood marathon, and not forgetting Holme Pierrepont the water sports centre. Nottingham is the place that boasts stars such as Brian Clough, Stuart Pearce and Torville and Dean. It is in the midst of this sporting array we find Nottingham Rugby.

Pay attention at the back now as we are going to do some history and I don’t want to have to give out detentions! The club was established in around 1877 by Alexander Birkin after returning from Rugby School where he was introduced to the sport. The Birkin family later purchased the land at Ireland Avenue that would be the home of the club until 2006 when a compulsory purchase order meant that Nottingham had to move. Currently they have facilities in West Bridgeford but the first team play their matches at Meadow Lane, the home of Notts County FC. Nottingham are still a traditional style club with seconds teams, academy, colts, juniors and minis. Until the advent of professionalism Nottingham were a big club which could be said to have had its best times in the 1980’s when legend says (OK actually my dad says, but it is the same thing really) that Nottingham rugby had quite a big following, Contrast this to now where they have an average gate of around a thousand supporters this season and Saints could feel that they are at a home game as we are expected to take about 1500 to 2000 ourselves.

In their heyday Nottingham could boast players such as Neil Back, Rob Andrew and Dusty Hare who scored 1578 points for the club from 166 appearances and then went on to be a record points scorer for the Leicester Tigers. Also on their list of former players is their only British Lion to date in Brian “the Pitbull” Moore, but for us Saintly ones the most notable is one D. West who played from 1990 – 1995 playing in 89 games and scoring 17 tries, including one against Saints in Dec 94.

In more recent history, Nottingham were promoted from National Division 2 along with Sedgely Park at the end of the 2003/04 season and have been fighting it out in Division 1 ever since. In their 3 seasons in the division they have had final placings of 11^th, 7^th and 9^th. This year however is seeing them really push to get into the group of teams who are challenging for the premiership.

If there are any of you out there who are thinking that Nottingham will be a bit of a pushover, I urge you to think again. They are 4^th in the league at the moment and that is no fluke.  The Green and Whites have lost only 3 games this season and have come out of each of those with a losing bonus and one of them with a try bonus as well. Their last 6 games have produced wins, four of which have been bonus point wins. In fact, along with Doncaster they are the next highest try bonus point takers to Saints with 6 so far this season.

The style of rugby that Nottingham play is very forward orientated. They are strong in the lineout and scrum and our forwards, who have been spoken about as being under strength in the last few matches, will really have to be on their game. I think that we are really going to miss Damo’s ballast effect in this game. The rolling mall is also somewhat of a speciallity for the Notts boys. If I were to tell you that 63% of their tries this season have come from the forwards and only 36% from the backs (I know that doesn’t add up to 100, they had a penalty try too)  If you compare this to our own figures of 65% of tries coming from our backs and 35% from the forwards you can see that the styles which the two teams play are as far away from each other as they could be. It will be a case of our backs against their forwards and Saints would do well not to get sucked in to Nottinghams gameplan.

Nottingham take very seriously the legend of Robin Hood Which can be seen by the fact that their top try scorer is the Sherriff of Nottingham. Ooops my mistake, it is openside flanker Luke Sherriff of Nottingham! (Sorry, couldn’t resist that one) He has scored twice the amount of his nearest rival for the top try scorers and has only started 6 games this season. Fortunatly for Saints (though very unfortunatly for him) we will not have to contend with him in the match as he is currently out injured with quite a bad knee injury.

So, that is Nottingham’s form coming into the game. What about Saints?

Saints perfect record came to an end on Saturday against Exeter where we narrowly (just pass the ball out Foxy and Ash is in) missed getting the 4 try bonus point. It should be remembered though that up until Saturday Exeter had the best defensive record in the league (They now share that with us) so that is no disgrace, the “unbeaten in this league” record is still the Saints for the taking. Saints have also managed to have still not conceded a bonus point in any of their matches this season, Throw into the mix that Nottingham have left every game with at least a point and we have a record to be broken, question is, whose? I believe that the Saints biggest enemy could be complacency and there is no room for that against a team like Nottingham, this game could be as defining a game as last week at Exeter.

So to the teams. Like Jim Mallinder, Glenn Delaney, Nottinghams DOR, likes to leave the naming of his team until about 10 minutes after play has started! (Come on guys give a girl some slack and get them out early, it is my first preview you know) Because of this I have just made it up, kind of names from a hat type thing. Here are the teams that I would predict for the match:

Nottingham                                               Northampton                          

15 Rohaan Nirmalendran                            15 Carlos Spencer

14 Greig Tonks                                         14 Chris Ashton

13 Matt Smith                                           13 Jon Clarke

12 Tim Molenaar                                       12 James Downey

11 Alex Dodge                                          11 Bruce Reihana

10 Ben Thompson                                     10 Barry Everitt

9  Tim Usazz                                             9  Mark Robinson

1  Nigel Hall                                              1  Tom Smith

2  Joe Duffey                                            2  Dylan Hartley

3  Ryan Hopkins                                        3  Euan Murray

4  Sam Raven                                           4  Alex Rae

5  Nic Rouse                                             5  Christian Short

6  Tim Stannard                                        6  Paul Tupai

7  Craig Hammond                                    7  Darren Fox

8  Dan Montagu                                         8  Mark Easter

For our bench I could see us doing what we did at Exeter last week and having a very forward based bench as Nottingham will really work our forwards. Emms may well have played his way into that after his performance for the Wandies on Monday. As for my one to watch, I don’t really have a one to watch from their team, it will be watch the forwards!

The Saints have only been beaten by Nottingham once in their last 8 meetings and that was back in the 91/2 season so Saints have the momentum from past meetings, although they had beaten us for the 10 meetings before that!

Now for my predictions. I think that the grounds will still be hard which will favour the running style of our backs over the sheer grunt of Nottinghams forwards, plus the fact that I think that our forwards will have a point to prove after the criticism of the last couple of weeks, Saints should win. I predict 41  20 to the Saints. I also predict that after the match my Mum will have cooked tea for me! (Unfortunately, you can’t all come. When I said to Mum that I would bring everyone round she told me that she wouldn’t have enough cutlery!! Sorry!)

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