TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE AS YOUNG SHARKS TAKE ON QUINS
Sharks fans with a ticket for the club’s first Investec Champions Cup fixture of the new season against Glasgow will get two games for the price of one – with an U23s clash with Harlequins taking place immediately after the first team game.
The U23s fixture, which kicks off at 3.15pm on Saturday 17th October following the Champions Cup opener at 1pm, will showcase some of the brightest talent from Sharks’ Senior Academy with first teamers including Tom Burrow, Tye Raymont, Ollie Davies and Alfie Longstaff set to be involved.
And with Quins bringing their latest crop of young talent up north, the stage is set for a blockbuster day of rugby. Get your ticket here now!
One ticket gets fans into the CorpAcq Stadium for both games and Sharks’ Academy Manager Fergus Mulchrone is urging the Sharks Family to stick around to support his young players.
“First and foremost this is about getting our Senior Academy players in a Sharks shirt, which probably doesn’t happen enough,” he said. “They get fantastic experience with brilliant coaches at clubs like Caldy, Sale FC, Doncaster and Sedgeley Park, but they don’t get to play in our game model enough. So this is really important.
“The other thing is the cohesion of playing with each other in our stadium. These lads all train full time with us but they’ll spend the majority of the first four or five years of their careers playing out on loan.
“So this is their chance to show the fans and the senior coaches that they can handle playing in a big stadium and they can execute our game model under pressure. We’d love as many people as possible to stick around and watch them because there are some really exciting young players here.”
The Sharks team will be entirely made up of players training full-time at Carrington, with plenty having already experienced first team rugby.
And the game is timed perfectly to give them valuable minutes ahead of the return of the PREM Rugby Cup in November.
“A lot of these lads will get a chance in the PREM Rugby Cup so this is a great lead-in for them,” Fergus said. “They’ll play together rather than all come back from loan clubs and be thrown together.
“This way they’ll have experienced tough periods in games and had positive experiences all together and they’ll be better as a collective for that.
“It’s a great chance to come and see a real mix of lads who have had game time already, like Tom Burrow, Tristan Woodman, Ollie Davies, Tye Raymont, Alfie Longstaff and Alex Wills, and younger lads like Charlie Bray, Will Bayston and Jordan Ikeh, who will be experiencing this for the first time.
“They’re all really excited to get out there together and show everyone what they’ve got against what we know will be a really good Quins team, who will play an exciting brand of rugby.
“It’s going to be such a good experience for them all and I can’t wait to see them go.”
