Malvern look for first win

The Spring Lane side have lost both their opening league matches to date — 38- 10 to Exmouth and 21-19 at London Irish Wild Geese — and are bidding to stop the rot.

Bottom-of-the-table Maidenhead were walloped 90-5 at Weston-super-Mare last Saturday and 56-11 by London Irish Wild Geese on the opening weekend.

Although injury-hit Malvern will still be without several key players, they are confident of securing a win at the third attempt.

Chairman Peter Woods said: “We have never played them but they have just come up and have had two heavy defeats. We are hopeful that even without a full squad, we can get the win and hopefully a bonus point as well.

“It’s very much an unknown in this league — and we don’t know if they have been short of players as well.

“So we take every fixture as a new one and until we have played all the teams we won’t know the strength of the division.”

Despite back-to-back defeats so far, Woods has been encouraged by the performances of Liam Hughes’ side, particularly in securing a losing bonus point at London Irish Wild Geese last Saturday.

He said: “We were completely hit by injuries so we had four youngsters who made their first appearances in senior rugby and slotted in well after the first halfhour.

Although it was disjointed with people playing out of position, we came away with a losing bonus point.

“It could have been worse, it was quite heartening to come away with a narrow defeat. They had a lot more experience in their squad.

“We were surprised, we thought we would get beaten more heavily so we took a lot of good out of that result.”

Scrum-half Tom Longley is ready to return after sitting an exam and stand-off Adam Dixon is making progress from an ankle injury.

􀁥 Malvern’s under 16s played a training match against Longlevens and clinched a 22-12 victory.

Their tries came from Nathan Beasley-Suffolk, Joe Whitehouse, Harri Claxton and March Cossali-Francis.