AT long last summer has arrived and the Doncaster Knights players are hard at work in our gym, on the track at Keepmoat and on our rugby pitches.
If they thought the first few weeks were hard then, with the heat, everything appears doubly hard..
Early in pre-season we incurred a seemingly high number of leg injuries as players really pushed themselves on the fast athletic track but everyone appears to be recovering well.
Toma Toke, our Tongan international prop, has arrived back from the South Seas and he will be followed by our new Tongan international signing Hudson Tonga'uiha who arrives next week. The rugby balls are now out and its nice to see everyone running with the ball. With over half of our players new to the squad this season, Lynn Howells and Justin Bishop have a lot of work to do blending them all together.
Something interesting happened in the gym during the week. Michael Cusack, one of our powerful props, was doing some squats with 277kg or 43 stone on the bar and, believe it or not, the bar bent.
Everyone is now waiting for Ngalu Ta'u, our other powerful prop, to get over his two recent knee operations fully to see if he can get his club record for the squat back from Michael.
Last Saturday I watched the third match in the Tri-Nations series between Australia and South Africa and, at long last, I felt that there was a game worth watching.
The referee kept a good but unobtrusive grip on the game (don't worry I am not going senile in my old age praising a referee) as he refereed the new experimental laws in what I would call the old style.
Unfortunately, what all three matches I have watched proved is that these new laws have not made the game more attractive as, for much of the time, both sides resort to aerial ping-pong to try to make the other side make a mistake. Boring, boring, boring!
The experimental law I would like to talk about this week is about the only one that seems to have universal approval and that is the introduction of an offside line five metres behind the hindmost feet of the scrum.
What this means for the game is that at the scrum, both back lines (all non-participants in the scrum) must be back five metres from the hindmost feet of the scrum.
This experimental law variation is designed to increase the space available to the team who wins the ball at the scrum. By having all the forwards committed at the scrum itself and 10 metres between the back lines, significant space is created in which to build an attack.
The main supporters of these new laws are Australia who, if they have one major weakness, is that they are probably the worst scrummagers of the top 10 nations.
This new law, contrary to perhaps their expectations, makes the scrummage even more important as the first three Tri-Nations games have proved as sides seek to take full advantage of the space created.
Finally, it's great to look out of the window and see the new West Stand taking place.
Most of the ground floor steelwork is now up and the concrete slabs that make up the terracing on which the seats are fixed are being put into place.
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