The Gwent club travel to Cornwall to play the Cornish Pirates and backs coach, Mark Ring, is looking forward to the challenge.
“It’s definitely going to be an intense game, the season is not even halfway through and we’ve got to make changes. While we made a lot of changes early on against Bridgend, we lost our stride a little but it’s all about finding the right balance.
“We’re going there to win, we’re not going there to roll over, we want to keep our run going. We’re trusting our squad, we feel we have a much stronger squad than we did have last year. The whole back row will change for Saturday but the guys coming in are real quality, Cae Trayhern, Marc Popham, Rhys Williams, are all quality players.
“Our star player the past three or four weeks has been hooker Gavin Price, but Jamie Sollis now is coming in as his young understudy if you like but it’s coming up to a crucial time for him now where he’s playing for a place in the Wales U20 squad in the Six Nations so he needs to play, so it’s an opportunity for Jamie to show what he can do against quality opposition.
“We’ve made 11 changes, one positional change but we’ve got every faith in the guys stepping in because every single one of them can do a quality job in their position, but the hardest thing is making so many changes all at once.”
Cross Keys have already qualified for the quarter finals but every point counts in the British & Irish Cup.
“We’ve won the pool, so it’s crucial that we now play to get a home draw in the quarter finals, if we took it too lightly we could concede quite a few points, lose the game and end up with points difference that wouldn’t give us that home advantage.
“It’s a far more intense situation than we’ve been used to week in week out. This is our first year in the British & Irish Cup and we’ve exceeded expectations, the game against Moseley gave us confidence and it was the Ayr game that was the turning point for us, that was a phenomenal game.
“There’s still a long way to go for Cross Keys in terms of potential but we couldn’t have asked for a better start to our first British & Irish Cup campaign. We still have a lot of tricks up our sleeve to plot our way round the game on Saturday as well as standing up to them physically but the team is growing in confidence with every game.”
Elsewhere, Aberavon face Esher at home, Llanelli travel to Bedford Blues, Doncaster host Swansea, while Neath play Plymouth Albion at The Gnoll and Pontypridd host Leeds Carnegie at Sardis Road which will be broadcast live on S4C. (KO 6.30pm).
