The 1st XV’s success this season is the result of seven years of hard work, not just from the players and coaches, but from committed people in all areas of the club. Yes, this has been a memorable campaign for the 1st XV and the players deserve a huge amount of credit - but clubs like Toc H, and many others like us, are built on the sweat of volunteers who give an awful lot of time and energy to make things run as smoothly as possible.

The progress made by this Toc H team, particularly over the past few years, has mirrored the significant efforts in the background. There are too many contributors to mention here but notable exceptions must be made for the club’s president, Oli Thomas, and our ubiquitous secretary, Arthur Crabtree, who does everything from sorting out flood damage to arranging referees, all while playing for the 3rd XV. Clubs like ours are built on characters like him.

Toc H also has fiercely committed (and some might say one-eyed) support from past players. They all care deeply about the club. Many of them have their own trenchant thoughts on team
selection, tactics, substitutions and, often most feverishly, how we try to play the game, most notably when it involves chucking the ball about indiscriminately in our own half. It goes without saying that this merry band of ex-players are not afraid to share their views in the bar post-match, and the team wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I was asked to write ‘a few paragraphs to sum up the season’ from my perspective, it occurred to me that my influence on the team has gradually lessened over the past few years. That is largely down to the scope of talent we have been able to recruit. Having lots of talented and hungry players to choose from makes any DOR’s job significantly easier. The club has done
very well in forging strong links with MMU and the University of Manchester. Both institutions have provided the club with a steady stream of high quality players. In the current squad, there are six
or seven who turn out regularly. There is no secret science to why that is: few will be surprised to learn that rugby-playing students enjoy heavily subsidised Saturday nights out in West Didsbury. To get in the mix alongside a load of young professionals who excel in extra-curricular activity is what they call networking.

In truth, there is a bit more to it than that. I have been involved in club rugby for 20 years and I have never come across a more welcoming and genuine set of players. In my view, that is the biggest reason why we are able to retain good players. At its core, the club has a strong group of committed senior players who continually drive standards on and off the field. We have an exceptional captain who is ably-supported by key players who train every week and always perform in big games. We might not win them all - but we are always competitive. As a result, we have attracted a number of players who have, and still could, comfortably play at a higher level.

It became clear to me soon after taking this role at Toc H that we would only consistently compete at this level by having a (much) bigger squad than our competition. I have never known a squad that cumulatively has so many skiing holidays, or holidays in general, or weekends away, or city breaks, weddings, birthdays, reunions, and stag-dos, all of which impinge on the rugby season. In my day…I’ll stop there. But that is why we have been routinely relying on around 35-40 players in the 1st XV each year since about 2017. Over the same period, I can count on one hand the
number of times we have been able to name the same starting XV in consecutive weeks: it just doesn’t happen.

The game is also getting tougher and tougher and quicker and quicker. I wasn’t there to see the
Widnes game last weekend (a christening, if you must know), but I was told it was ‘brutal' and
‘tight’, with two evenly-matched sides going after it. A few of our boys were too sore to train on Tuesday. Of course, on another day, the result could easily have gone the other way, as it has against Widnes in most of the games we have played against them in recent seasons. The point I am clumsily trying to make here is that as the games get harder we have had to adapt to the needs of our personnel in order to maintain progress. For example, we rarely do contact in training and we only train once week. That may seem counter-intuitive when most teams are training twice a week - but we have found that 90 per cent of our players, most with busy jobs in Manchester, make a point of prioritising one night a week for rugby. That has worked for us in terms of game planning, while the occasional post-work session on Thursdays does no harm whatsoever to team building. The only way this model can work, though, is to have a lot of good players to choose from.

Like many clubs, we have also invested in our coaching team - again, all volunteers. Unfortunately, personal circumstances meant the brilliant Sean Phillips wasn’t able to commit to coaching us this season - but the work he has done on the defensive side of our game is evident each week. Our points conceded has dropped from an average of 22.2 per game to 7.1 (at the time of writing) over a three-year period. That has made the biggest difference to our results by far.

Then there is JB, a self-styled ‘triple threat’, whose weekly podcast Eggchasers helps to elevate the club’s profile and keep him relevant (joke). JB is among the first to eschew the notion of culture - but in his own inimitable way he is (perhaps reluctantly) a hugely valuable contributor to it. There is not a position on the pitch he won’t play and his appetite for the game is utterly infectious. JB has done a great job in building a close bond among the club’s forwards. On occasion he has used unconventional methods, for example in his now infamous Forwards Pre- Season Day Out, when at least one of our best players got knocked out in a boxing ring. There is also the fabled Front Row Lunch, a boozy affair in town at the end of the season which, by the sounds of it, rarely ends well.

So I hope that gives a little bit of background to the season and how we have ended up where we are. Of course, the club is delighted to have won the ADM Premier Division - winning a league
title at Level 7 was a long way off when we were getting thumped by teams on the road at Level
8.

But we had a plan. We stuck to it. Now for the next plan…with so many players threatening retirement. Empty threats, I hope.

Thanks for you support. JP