I was gonna give it a miss until I realised they have a cash bar!

As ever, thanks very much to Emma and the committee for organising this, the club for supporting it and Lambo and Kevin for competing. We had a great evening and some really interesting rugby and non-rugby discussion.

Here’s the most interesting rugby-related stuff.

They’ve split the DoR and General Manager roles so that the DoR can have a total focus on getting the best 23 players out on the pitch each week. There was a lot of praise for what Billy Millard is doing in the GM role and how much the tone has changed through him and Gustard in pre-season.

One big focus has been on getting the players to spend time together and have fun away from the pitch so that they build up more trust and willingness to work for each other - it was commented that last year they didn’t seem to have that connection. Which said, someone else pointed out that the senior players who were meant to bring that spent most of the year injured - as an example Archie White (still an academy player) played 20 matches last year, which was not what they had planned for him (or for Marcus Smith).

The rationale around the choice of centres was explained to us by comparison with Sarries. They can have Barritt (a classic defensive / crash ball guy but not a creator in attack) at 12 because Alex Goode brings the creativity and distribution from fullback. Mike Brown isn’t that sort of fullback, so Quins want to have ball-playing ability at 12, which Saili, Tapuai and Lang all bring.  That was part of a wider conversation about getting combinations of players across the pitch.

Catrakilis and Bothma both reported as fully fit and ready to go (as are some of the other long term injuries - Horwill, Collier), with Saili in full training but they are taking it cautiously because it’s a concussion.

Gustard is likely to want to reshape the squad over the season by trading quantity for quality. So we should expect to see a few big signings and a number of “club” players leaving, with the burden put on the academy to step up as necessary.

Thanks for the update Poorfour

Thanks for the update. Interesting comment about players spending time together off the pitch. Wasn’t this a big focus of Conor? I remember Ugo, JTH and Danny often talking about it.

In terms of turnout, it was a smaller number of guests than in the last few years, so there was a commensurately smaller player turnout as there were two players per table, mostly Academy but Wallace and Catrakilis were both there. The Davids and Dippy were also there.

If I could make one suggestion, would it be possible for the DJ to not play the music at a loud volume during the meal?  I admit it's probably an age thing but I literally could hardly hear the person sitting next to me so conversation was difficult at the best of times.

There were several 'officials' walking around the dinning area that you could have spoken to.