By Paul Smith 
Coventry Rugby head coach Alex Rae has welcomed the re-organisation of the coming season’s fixture list announced late last week.
A combination of the autumn World Cup, an 11-team Championship and a newly-launched cup competition involving 21 clubs created a stuttering 2023/24 campaign during which Cov rarely saw action on more than three consecutive weekends.
The promotion of Chinnor to fill the void left by the collapse of Jersey Reds takes English rugby’s second tier back to 12 clubs and according to Rae a much more active season will result.
“Once the cup fixtures drop in and fill November and February things will look very different to last year,” he said.
“We’re expecting a really busy season with very few weeks off once we get started.
“Last season we had lots of breaks between games but it looks like we’ll have blocks of five or six games right through this year which will help us build momentum.
“We’re better playing regularly as everyone has seen during the last two seasons when we’ve really got rolling in the second half of the campaign, so this suits us well.”
Cov have been back training since July 1st and are working their way towards the first league game in mid-September via pre-season friendlies against Birmingham Moseley and Chinnor.
And according to their head coach his squad are looking no further than their opening night trip to the Richmond Athletic Ground to face London Scottish.
“I know it sounds a bit of a dull thing to say but I tend not to look too far ahead with fixtures as that can be a dangerous game to play,” he said.
“We already can’t wait for London Scottish on the first Friday night and our full focus is on that. Our record at the RAG in recent times hasn’t been great – our first win in a long time came quite recently – and we have no right to expect to just walk away from there with an easy win.
“They have built nicely over the last year, had a lot of close games and took a few good scalps there last season so it will be a tough test for us to open with.”
Despite his ‘one game at a time’ mantra Rae was unable to resist a brief look ahead to Cov’s festive season programme in which the visit of defending champions Ealing to the Butts Park Arena could well draw the biggest crowd of the Championship season.
“When you look at the Christmas and New Year fixtures you always want to see when exactly they will be played as you hope to have two big occasions,” he said.
“Throw the visit of league champions Ealing into the Christmas week mix and you know there will be a big crowd here at the Butts.
“It was one of the stand-out games last season for sure with two really good teams having a proper ding-dong and I’m sure this year will be no different.”
Pre-season friendlies at the Butts Park Arena:
August 24th (3pm kick off) Coventry Rugby v Birmingham Moseley
September 13th (7.30pm kick off) Coventry Rugby v Chinnor
These games are included in season memberships which are available here: https://www.coventryrugby.co.uk/membership/
Match tickets are available via this link: https://www.coventryrugby.co.uk/tickets/
