Cambridge face relegation battle for first time since promotion in Champ Rugby

Cambridge begin the Champ Rugby season knowing that relegation is back on the menu for the first time since they reached the second tier in 2023.

Having finished bottom of the league in both of their previous Champ Rugby campaigns, Cambridge will now face a battle to stay in the league.

With a raft of new recruits and a new head coach in former All Black Craig Newby, the Blood & Sand look to be gearing up for a season-long fight to stay in the division.

“Our goal as a club is to avoid relegation,” Newby said. “If we can do that, then that’s an achievement. We want to be hard to beat and be competitive. We’ll have some tough games, but in those tough games, we want to be competitive and earn some respect.

“We want to box smart with the games we can win. We’re not going to die wondering. We’re not going to get into arm wrestles with teams that we can’t afford to do that with, because some of these top teams it will be tough to fight them.”

Newby is taking a pragmatic approach in a league that sees a host of different models utilised across the 14 teams. A quirk of Champ Rugby is that some teams, such as Ealing Trailfinders and Worcester Warriors, are full-time professional outfits.

In contrast, others, like Cambridge and Caldy, have to juggle competing at an elite level with a career outside of rugby.

This presents unique challenges not only for players but also for coaches, who face a more difficult time managing the workload of their teams.

Newby said: “The biggest [challenge] is physically. Fitness levels, strength levels, recovery and all those professional bits of the game around the body. It's a challenge around how we can maximise our weeks with them and still get physical gains.

“Then there’s obviously the medical side of things. You might get seen once a week rather than once a day. In terms of rugby, it’s just contact time, meetings, one-on-ones, and full training is always going to be a challenge to compete with full-time teams.

“But we’ve been pretty smart and creative about how we get information into the players earlier in the week, and how the players drive their own learning so that we can hopefully get information into them but keep it as simple as possible.

“In some ways it’s a positive that we don't have as much time with them because we can narrow our focus onto one or two key areas and really get after those.”

The new format in Champ Rugby means that the bottom side is relegated to National 1 automatically, while the 12th and 13th teams could also face the drop.

The 12th and 13th teams enter a single-legged play-off, with the loser going on to play the side finishing second in National 1 for the final spot in Champ Rugby for the 26/27 campaign.

Newby added: "I love [the new format]. It's great for teams at the top to be aspirational, having something to achieve and strive for, winning the league and then potentially winning promotion, which is exciting for them.

"There's more jeopardy around relegation, and if you're in Nat 1 you win that league and come up and it's a reward."

The Champ Rugby 25-26 season starts on October 3. For more information, visit www.champrugby.com