Maurice Fitz Gerald from Biarritz Olympique  returning to his South-West London homeland; and Steven So’oialo and Maama Molitika adding to the growing South Sea island contingent who seem to find the environment of South-West London particularly to their liking. Andre continues as skipper. We’ve taken four guys up from the Academy into the main squad: Henry Barratt, Adrian Jarvis, Andy Reay and Tom Williams, congratulations to them, they will hopefully be the first of many. There may well be one or two additions to that squad there may or may not be an announcement later this week that has got into a few last minute snarl ups but I am confident they will be announced soon and there will probably be one more addition to the squad later in the season, obviously assuming that we don’t have to make any more emergency signings because of injury. 

Copsey, Evs and Vos at the Press Conference  ©Prof

The team against Saracens on Friday night is not a first team as such but it is a reasonably strong side nevertheless. We’ve got a few niggling injuries at the moment, they weren’t considered, Dafydd James has got a slight quad strain, nothing serious and George Harder is still coming back from a knee op and I’m not keen to risk him just yet but if it was a cup final both of them would probably be available for selection. 

Tani Fuga picked up a very nasty eye injury last week over in Ireland which required 35 stitches both in and outside the eye but he will be available for the first league game if selected.

Tony Diprose dislocated a thumb against Ulster last weekend and he was not available for selection. There are probably one or two others that I am being a bit over cautious with but other than that we only have one long term injury at the moment and that is Maurice Fitz Gerald, one of our new signings,  who picked up a bit of a back injury against Bedford and that’s going to be another two or three weeks before he is able to play. Other than that the injuries are all pretty short term.

Tani’s injury was purely accidental, one of the Ulster locks knocked Kai Horstmann into Tani who was in a support position,  the top of Kai’s head smashed into Tani’s eye. I think Fuga will play against London Irish if selected next week, he’s a tough boy.

When asked what were Quins’ targets for the season Evs said that if you take any of the Premiership sides and look at their starting XV they are all very strong,  and Bath showed last year that you can move very quickly up and down this league. Every year you feel that you want to challenge for the title but we never make any predictions, we have improved every year for the last four years. If you’re asking me, which you’re not but if you’ll let me rephrase the question, ‘what would be a good year?’ I think if we could continue that trend then we’d be pleased.

Evs then spoke about the Heineken Cup, it’s a great competition and we are very happy to be in it, and when you’re in it you want to make an impact, but at the moment we’re not even thinking about it yet, we have five or six matches to go before that. We’re not in a group of death or anything like that, obviously we have Munster, their European record speaks for itself; Castres are one of the biggest French clubs in terms of budget and I suppose we and the Ospreys are the outsiders in the group but we’ll what happens.

When asked if the money spent on ground development will effect the money spent on the playing squad Evs said we are a wage capped team, that’s what we are, we spent right up to the wage cap last season and we will again this season. We don’t spend any more, we don’t do deals outside the cap, we don’t do any offshore stuff, that’s what we do. 

When asked about Dafydd James Evans confirmed that he had been signed primarily as a centre.

When asked about the accounts Evs said that the draft accounts had been done and that we would probably break even for the first time, which is a nice landmark and now that we have done it we thought we would go and borrow a lot of money and have another go. Just for the record the biggest loss was about £2.5+M in the late ‘90s and when Evs took over it was a deficit of about £1.8M.

When asked about the A side and the Academy Evs said that we might use the A side differently this season, last year we went for it and put out the strongest second best team we could. Every side says they have great youngsters but I think we really do have a good group coming through, the four that have come up this season are all backs but there are some good forwards just behind them, Chris Cracknell, Tom Guest at No.8 and the young prop Mark Lambert who is playing on Friday night, he’s only 19 and a tighthead. Of the 31 in the squad at the moment 12 or 13 are home grown, I’d like to get that up to 50% as a general rule, I wouldn’t like to be too far above or below that in the long run. 

Evs then chatted about the new RFU compensation scheme for England players, he said it probably wasn’t what either party would like but it’s as good as you can get in a European labour market. As a compensation programme it’s fine but as an incentive to play English players it doesn’t really work because it leads to a restraint to trade under European law, both sides wanted to find a was of incentivising [I think that must me marketing talk] the selection of English players but you can’t do that, so there’s no point trying to achieve the impossible.

The conference was over and the individual interviews started, but that’s for another report which will be coming to this site soon …

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