Just like their hosts, Old Albanians have four bonus-point wins out of four so far this season and Guernsey director of rugby Jordan Reynolds believes the key to success could lie with home advantage.
‘One element of it is us playing on the park, the other is how effective our crowd can be. When we get that support, it certainly has an impact on the pitch,’ he said in relation to the Fortress Footes Lane factor.
‘Would we love to go the majority of the season at home unbeaten? Absolutely, but we have some big challenges to do that and OAs are likely to be one of the biggest.
‘We have not had a lot of games at home so far and the evening kick off will hopefully get even more support down there.
‘We are facing a something something a little bit more unique – OAs are not here to be confrontational, they are here to shift the ball and they are really good at it.
'Last season they were top of the league till February time and they have pretty much the same squad, so we know what they are capable of.’
After starting their season with two narrow victories over Canterbury and Barnes, OAs have really hit their straps over the last fortnight, racking up in excess of 50 points in their convincing wins over Westcombe Park and London Welsh.
‘OAs are probably a version of what we faced against Henley and Colchester, but on steroids.
'They play really unstructured rugby, they love to shift the ball to the edge and they will chance their hand from their own in-goal,’ Reynolds said.
‘As I said, we have faced two sides like that already and we talk about taming the tempo.
'We managed to do that in the Henley and Colchester games, no doubt this will be an even tougher challenge, but it is one everyone is excited about.’
However, he emphasised that his players were not getting carried away with themselves.
‘I don’t really think it’s about controlling the emotions going through the players, but in a week like this we can feed on it to boost our performance.
‘I feel the atmosphere within the squad at the moment is one of calm. There is a lot of confidence from the first four games and on the back of that is a really good understanding of how we are trying to play.
‘We talk about trying to make little 5-10% improvements each week and this week our preparation so far has been pretty much in line with where we have been in the first four weeks. I have seen no nervousness. The players are focused on how we are going to develop.’
Josh Poullet, who was a late withdrawal from last week’s win at Colchester due to illness, returns to the Raiders line-up with Brad Webb dropping to the bench in the one change to the starting XV.
Raiders against Old Albanians kicks off at 5pm tomorrow.
Guernsey Raiders team
Wrafter, Callery, Dromantas, Shenton, Broadhurst, Creber, Rice, Poullet, Simmonds, Parks, Smith, C McGann, M Armstrong, A Armstrong, Roberts.
Replacements: Cantle, Currie, Webb, Rutledge, Dawe.
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