I WOULD like to welcome everyone involved with Richmond to Old Bath Road for tonight’s eagerly anticipated first-versus-second encounter.

We’ve had some great occasions under the lights in the past few years, but this one takes the biscuit – we’ve had record pre-matchday ticket sales and are expecting a big crowd, so hopefully it will be a fantastic atmosphere.

I’ll be surprised if there aren’t more than 1,500 people here and possibly significantly more than that – I hope everyone has an enjoyable evening along with a great advert for rugby in the Thames Valley area.

Richmond have done very well to get to where they have, and so have we – to win 10 games in this league at this stage of the season is phenomenal.

You can’t take anything away from either side, and for them to be unbeaten especially so – at Rotherham we played well, made two mistakes and got punished. Such are the margins in National One.

Elsewhere, it was nice to see the Colts overcome Tring to reach the last 16 of the National Cup recently, while we again had plenty of players representing Berkshire Under 18s last Sunday.

It’s excellent, bodes well for the future of the club and again I’ve got to praise Dave Cox and his team of coaches who take it seriously – that rubs off and those lads are very lucky to have the group of people they’ve got looking after them.

In turn they deserve all the success they can get and roll on the next round at Rosslyn Park next month!

More positive news comes from the Centaurs (3rd XV). They were floundering a bit last season, and we did have serious concerns, but Jack Gaylor said he would sort it out and he’s rolled up his sleeves and done so.

He’s got the guys training regularly; a settled squad and they’re enjoying their rugby. Last Saturday’s win against Thatcham was fantastic and should give them a further positive boost.

Finally, I’m delighted to say for those who can’t get to the game for any reason, we are again livestreaming thanks to NextGenXV.

They do a fantastic job and are probably underrated and under-thanked for the work they do in promoting the sport.

The RFU want to grow the audience, and we need people like NextGen to help us do that.

Their footage will hopefully allow those who can’t make it in person to see the improvements we’ve made around the ground, to the team, the medical provision, the whole package is significantly better than where it was.

With the conversations around minimum operating standards for Tier Two, we’ve ticked a lot of the boxes not because we had to, but because we felt it was the right thing to do for the club in the past 10-15 years.