RUGBY: BANK OF IRELAND LEINSTER SCHOOLS SENIOR CUP FIRST ROUND PREVIEW: NEWBRIDGE COLLEGE V BELVEDERE COLLEGE
Newbridge College facing tough test against Belvedere
By Daire Walsh
NEWBRIDGE College will be heading into the lion’s den at Donnybrook tomorrow afternoon, when they face Dublin’s Belvedere College in the opening round of the Leinster Schools Senior Cup (3pm kick-off).
They suffered an agonising defeat to eventual winners Cistercian College Roscrea in a semi-final replay last year, while ten-time champions Belvedere reached the 2015 decider following their penultimate round success over Clongowes Wood College.
With a number of players returning from last season’s squad, Belvedere are one of the pre-competition favourites, but Newbridge coach David Brew is pleased that they are entering the contest as underdogs.
“Well, certainly I know Belvo are up there as one of the favourites this year. I know they’ve an awful lot of that team, the starting team, back from last year’s final,” Brew remarked. “I think certainly we’re going into it as underdogs. I suppose in all sports, everyone likes the underdogs tag. We’ll take it that we’ve nothing to lose, and just give it our best shot. I guess that’s the best way to look at it.”
However, Newbridge have a total of 11 players returning from their 2015 squad, and Brew revealed that this familiarity within the group has aided their preparation for the game.
“We’ve a good number back. That certainly helps in the preparation, that you don’t have to worry too much about the unknown, because there’s an awful lot of them that have been talking about what it was like last year to the new guys that are in the squad now. I think there’s a definitely an air in Newbridge College now, that we’re sitting at the top table a lot of the time, so we don’t fear anyone really. We’ve lost semi-finals in the last three years in-a-row, so we certainly feel that we’re worth our spot and we’ll give any team a good fight on the day,” said Brew.
Despite finishing their group campaign with five wins from as many outings, Newbridge’s Leinster Senior League journey ended in a quarter-final defeat to Kilkenny College. Brew acknowledged that it was a disappointing end to the competition for the south Kildare boys, but with strength in depth at their disposal in 2015, he said that there will be a number of tight calls when they name their match-day selection.
“We’d a few injuries earlier on, which didn’t help, but when we look at the league campaign, we went through with five out of five before we got to the quarters. We were disappointing in that quarter-final against Kilkenny.”
“When we were there on the day, we were kind of thinking it was a bad performance, but when we looked at the video afterwards, we actually played quite well. We just dropped a lot of opportunities.”
“I’d say overall we’re quite happy with our preparation. We feel we’ve plenty of depth this year. We’ve a lot of tight calls to make running into the match. Probably 23, 24 guys going for the 15 places, and there’s some very tight calls between them,” Brew concluded.