WITH TWO home games in May against Tony Benson’s Oxford and Championship One newcomers York City Knights, Oldham Rugby League Club faces an important month in its quest to get back into the top two.
Only one club wins promotion this year and that’s not the team that finishes as league leaders, but the side that wins a top-five play-off.
With only nine clubs in the division and no Northern Rail Cup competition this time, each team will play four additional league games – two at home and two away, selected at random in order to provide a meaningful fixture list of 20 matches.
In those circumstances it was felt appropriate to allocate the play-off winners with the ultimate prize of promotion rather than give it to the club that finishes top of a league competition that isn’t a genuine division in the accepted sense.
Clubs finishing first and second have the best chance of going through to the Grand Final. And if the first few weeks of the season are anything to go by it’s going to be one helluva scrap for a top-two finish.
Every team in the division has been beaten at least once already and early indications suggest that eight of the nine will have plenty to offer in the toughest Championship One campaign for a long time.
Having been held to a 20-20 draw at Whitebank by Hemel Stags before slipping up at Hunslet Hawks on Good Friday, Oldham head into May in third place behind the Hawks and York, the duo that came down from the Championship at the end of last season.
In March, Hunslet suffered a shock home defeat by York, who were then turned over at their own Huntington Stadium by an Oxford squad that has been rebuilt this year by ex-Oldham boss Benson and will be coming to Whitebank on Sunday (May 4) in search of its third win in a row.
Given that Benson’s boys were one of only two teams to win at Whitebank in the league last season, Sunday’s rematch (3pm kick off) is certain to be a tasty one.
Benson will love nothing better than to repeat his Whitebank triumph of 2013, while Oxford’s former Oldham players, Chris Clarke, Tommy Connick, Valu Bentley, Dave Ellison and Alex Thompson, will regard a return to their old club as a match that must be won.
For their part, Roughyeds will be eager to avenge last year’s 18-16 loss, and no one will be keener than half-back Brett Robinson, who was a member of the Oxford side that won here a year ago.
Robinson was left out of the Oldham squad that failed to hit its best form at Hunslet, but if Naylor recalls him for Sunday’s showdown, the former Widnes Vikings man is certain to be aiming for a top-class performance at the hub of the Roughyeds’ attack.
Naylor was less than happy with the performances of full-back Tom Whitehead and wingers Mo Agoro and Dale Bloomfield at Hunslet last time out and former Saddleworth Rangers youngster Steven Nield was hoping to do enough in the under-20s side to win a recall against Oxford at either full-back or on the wing.
Fellow first-team squad members David Cookson at centre and Mark Hobson at loose-forward also played in the latest under-20s game, an 18-12 defeat at Sheffield, in the hope of getting Naylor’s nod for a game which has the potential to be the most fiercely-contested of the entire season.
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