Windsor aiming to bounce right back
Captain focused on the future following club’s demotion
Windsor plan to rebuild in the close season and come back stronger after finishing bottom of the Regional 2 Thames division following their 26-7 home defeat to newly crowned champions Hammersmith & Fulham.
The result was an awful lot better than the 87-5 defeat they suffered at the hands of the same opponents on the opening day of the season, but it’s still been a desperately disappointing - injury affected - campaign for Andy Symons' team.
However, rather than wallowing in their demotion, which has been on the cards for much of the campaign, captain Chris Emmett is already focused on how they can improve the squad ahead of next season. They don’t yet know which league they’ll be demoted into, but Emmett is confident they’ll bounce back and put themselves in the mix for promotion.
Speaking ahead of Saturday’s final day defeat, he said: “We didn’t want to go down, we would have loved to have stayed up,” said captain Chris Emmett. “We’ve not managed to stay up at this level this year, which has been frustrating, but when we consider how much of a rebuilding job we’ve got on our hands, and the standard of the London leagues, it was probably just a little bit too much of an ask.
“We have a couple of weeks off and then I believe we will be playing some cup games. We don’t know what’s happening with those though and the RFU haven’t told us that or the league we’ll be playing in next season.
“From my understanding it will be playing teams we played against a couple of years ago, the likes of Watford, High Wycombe, Buckingham.
“Hopefully we will find that out sooner rather than later.”
Emmett also believes the Royals will be able to keep the bulk of this season’s squad together and add quality to it in certain areas.
“I think we should be able to do that,” he said. “One of the things that has been most frustrating this year is we’ve had so many injuries. We’ve missed some of our key players in games. Hopefully next year will be a lot better in that regard and we’ll have a cleaner bill of health. But we’ll also be looking to add to the squad for sure.
“All clubs get injuries and it’s not an excuse, but this season we’ve had four or five key guys get injured when we really could have done with them.
“Next year we will have an exciting opportunity to hopefully put together a team that can get promoted. I was luckily part of the
team that got promoted three or four years ago and the last game we won at home is probably my fondest rugby memory.
“Going down is not a nice feeling. I genuinely think we are good enough for this league and we have showed that in some real periods.
“That fantastic result against Aylesbury the other week, I wasn’t part of it because I was injured but I was watching. That was unbelievable.
“We have had some other results this season where we’ve nearly put away teams who are second and third in the league.
“That shows we are not far off at all. We will rebuild next season, come back stronger and hopefully come back into this league and be a lot more competitive that’s for sure.”