President’s Welcome Graham Armitage

A very warm welcome to you all today including our visitors from London Scottish for this their first ever visit to Paton Field. We met previously back in early December at the Athletic Ground, a game which Scottish won by 19 points to 9 and we therefore hope to square the series today although Scottish will no doubt have other ideas.

Last week Caldy travelled to Coventry to face a side in good form in 3rd. place in the league although they did lose on their last outing the week before down at Cornish Pirates. Caldy started well scoring first but were gradually worn down following a number of mistakes which were severely punished by the home team. Despite possibly having parity in terms of territory, each time Coventry attacked they seemed to score whereas the reverse was true for Caldy whose forward display probably deserved a better return. Sam Dickinson, Ruben Birch and the pack as a whole never gave up and were eventually rewarded when scrum half Chris Pilgrim scored in the final minute following forward pressure and a rare mistake by the Coventry forwards.

Other fixtures on the day saw Scottish playing Pirates, who are in good form, last weekend at home and where somewhat unfortunate to lose by 2 points outscoring the visiting side by 5 tries to 4 apparently. In fact they have lost by close margins against a number of teams recently including Jersey away which is both indicative of their current form and belies their position in the league table.

Today’s game therefore presents a further challenge against a Scottish side at the bottom of the league who will be determined to close the gap between our two clubs in terms of league points in their efforts to climb to safety. They have a number of quality players who presented us with problems in our previous fixture, and, dependent on the team they bring, will no doubt be very competitive today. Scottish are a team with a famous history since their inception in 1878 and have provided over 200 international players mainly as you may suspect to the Scotland side over the years. Names like Mike CampbellLamerton, Gavin Hastings and Kenny Logan amongst others come to mind. A number of these players went on to play for the British Lions including 4 of whom who captained the team. In 1998/99 Scottish were playing in the Premiership but following administration were forced to drop 9 leagues by the RFU ( one rule for some, one rule for others