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Joe Jones previews the return of the Premiership Cup with Newcastle at home

Front Row, Joe Jones discusses how the Knights are feeling heading into this weekend’s Premiership Cup clash against Newcastle Falcons. 

Last week the Knights suffered a disappointing defeat to Nottingham, Jones explained how the team have reacted to that: “We’ve had a great reaction after Friday, obviously we were very disappointed, but we’ve taken a lot of learnings from it. And especially from the week before coming so close to beating Coventry away and obviously at the start of the season beating Ealing away.”

We thought we would take that momentum into Nottingham away, which we know is a really hard place to go, and unfortunately didn’t get the result we wanted. But, I felt that we got some learnings on Monday and we really want to take that into the Prem Cup now and put a real big performance in this Saturday back at home.” 

The Premiership cup returns for the next three weeks and Jones shared his thoughts on the competition, “it’s a new competition and it’s a great competition, we get to play against some really good teams in Newcastle and Sale next week. But in the short term, we’re back at home against Newcastle, we really want to put on a big performance.”

The first leg of this fixture, when the Knights went to Newcastle, finished a nail biting, 31-28. Jones explained how this adds to their drive to win this weekend: 

“We’re expecting a close game, we’re looking at ourselves a lot this week, our outcomes in terms of set piece around the field. I think last week unfortunately we let some of our standards slip in some areas so this week we just want to back that up.

“As I keep reiterating, we’re back at home this week and we feel like some of our best performances for example against Hartpury. It’s probably our best performance of the season, so we’re looking just to get back home and perform really.” 

The front row discussed the impact of a big home crowd, “it always helps, it’s great having your family and friends watching. Especially the fans, it’s almost like that 16ht man, or woman.” 

He also explained how the ‘northern battle’ adds an extra element of competitiveness to the cup: 

“They’re all northern clubs, if you look at the DNA of all the northern clubs, Newcastle, Sale, Caldy and Doncaster are all massively physical teams with really good set piece. All very similar, thats why it’s quite had to find an edge against each other. Hopefully we find that this week.” 

You can secure your ticket to this weekends fixture  here.

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