President’s Welcome Graham Armitage

A very warm welcome to you all today including our visitors from Ampthill in this our return league fixture this season. We have already met 3 times this season, twice in the Cup with each team winning the home game and once in the league away which Ampthill won by two points 26 -24. We hope to square the series today although Ampthill will no doubt have other ideas.

Last week we travelled ‘abroad’ for the first time as a Championship team to visit Jersey on their home turf, although no passports were required. An amazing number of Caldy supporters, estimated at between 3 and 4 hundred in total, made the trip to celebrate this event and whilst the result was difficult to take, the population of Jersey is no longer in any doubt as to where Caldy is on the social, geographical and rugby map. The game itself was mainly one way traffic with Jersey showing their credentials as a potential Premiership team, playing with both pace and guile that Caldy found difficult to handle from the outset. Whilst Caldy never gave up, and in fact had scoring chances at the end to retrieve a losing bonus point, Jersey were well worth their record breaking victory. As Matt our head coach reported after the game the difference between a fully professional team and a team that trains two evenings a week was fully exploited on this occasion.

Today’s game presents a further challenge against an Ampthill side just below us in the league who fared reasonably well in the Cup competition, and who will be determined to close the gap between our two clubs in terms of league points. They have a number of quality players who presented us with problems in our previous fixtures, which will have no doubt been scrutinised by the home coaching team. Hopefully we will have learnt much from our recent games and can rediscover some of our form from earlier this year.

We welcome in particular their President Pat Sherry, Chairman Alex Radley, Director of Rugby Mark Lavery and other members of their committee some of whom will be joining us for lunch today. They have become old friends, our two clubs having now met on many occasions in the past decade. Ampthill have more recently proved their credentials over several years of playing Championship rugby having been admirably coached by ex Welsh international Paul Turner and retaining their league status, with some noteable successes against top sides in previous