Kingstone Press League 1 Preview: York City Knights v University of Gloucestershire All Golds
York City Knights coach James Ford felt his team will learn valuable lessons from last week’s game against Oldham.
“I was disappointed with the end result last week but credit to Oldham, they’re a good team, they stuck to their plans and pulled away from us in the last 10 minutes,” he said.
“We’ll learn from that, we’re a young team, we made some uncharacteristic errors at the back end of the game and put ourselves under pressure but we’re all willing to learn, myself included. Hopefully we’ll get another crack at Oldham later on in the season.
“I watched Gloucester against Oldham and they were very competitive in just about every aspect. Lee Greenwood’s obviously doing a real good job down there.
“There’s plenty of distance travelled on how they’ve improved over the season and they’ll fancy their chances, so we need to make sure we’re really well prepared and ready for a tough game. They’re a big team and they’re going to come up and try and build some momentum so we need to be on the money.”
Centre Greg Minikin is a doubt with a hamstring problem.
Reflecting on last week’s win at South Wales Scorpions, University of Gloucestershire All Golds coach Lee Greenwood said: “In patches we were good. We ran in three tries straightaway but missed all the kicks which kept them in the game and as soon as they scored it was tight. In a 15-minute spell of either half we did the damage really. It was pretty comfortable in the end for us.
“It’s back to being underdogs again this week at York, the odds are stacked against us. They’ve changed the kick off from Sunday at 3 o’clock to 6 o’clock on Saturday at Heworth. The Sunday away games are easier for us because we can go up on Saturday and stay over but now we’re just going to go up on the day, which isn’t ideal.
”It’s a hell of a long day for those guys who are travelling but York are having their problems so there’s no point in adding to them.
“We were massive underdogs anyway but will go up and give it our best.”
Graham O’Keefe is a doubt with a dislocated finger while loose forward Chris Vitalini has a calf strain however prop Izaak Duffy comes back into the reckoning.