By GTD
January 4 2007

The first home game of this new year sees Saracens visit the Madejski. Let’s hope that it brings more fortunes (and points) than we took away from a boggy Kingsholm on New Year’s Day. The Men in Black contain a few ‘friendly faces’, two of which we will see on display on Sunday with both Paul Gustard and Rodd Penney making 14 appearances each this season so far for Sarries. Gussie gets a start and Rodd will start on the bench as Alan Gaffney recalls 8 players : Kevin Sorrell, Dan Scarbrough, Kameli Ratuvou, Neil de Kock, Cobus Visagie and Ben Skirving with Simon Raiwalui returning to captain the side. Our favourite Glen Jackson also gets a recall. Ross Laidlaw unfortunately remains injured and so won’t feature.

Irish have had the upper hand in 5 of the last 6 meetings between the sides in the league with May 2004 being the last time the men from Watford took the points. Sarries league form is slightly better than ours winning 4 out of the last 6 games in the league, their last game being a defeat to Leicester at Welford Road. Irish have won 3 out of the last 6 in the league and their last 3 games in all competitions at ‘Fortress Madstad’ including wins against Ulster and Leicester although our last game resulted in a 15-3 defeat to Gloucester only a few days ago.

Sarries enter this round of the Guinness Premiership with the title of joint top try scorers this season (with Leicester), a title that Irish proudly boasted last term. This season has seen us return very close to the bottom of that league scoring only 18 tries to date v 33 for Sarries.

Saracens are in 5th, a position they can put down to well and truly beating the majority of sides they come up against who are below them in the league. They are, however only 6 points ahead of Irish (32 to 26) in 7th place.

It seems that a keen defence will again be needed. If some of the defensive work shown in the early part of the festive period can be repeated then once again Irish could come away with the points against our London Rivals. Let’s hope injury niggles have been kind and BS has a near full squad to choose from with key players such as Rikki Flutey who must be knocking on the door now.

Prediction : LI by 6