BOURNVILLE Head Coach Alex Grove has praised the resilience of his players after coming through a challenging end to 2025 with flying colours.
Bourns ended the year with five straight wins in Regional One Midlands from which they earned 23 points from a possible maximum of 25 while the Blues, the club’s Second XV, also fulfilled a demanding five match programme over the same period.
“This five-game bloc has really challenged our squad. We don’t have a big squad and to fulfil ten fixtures across those five weeks has been a challenge,” Grove said.
“The first team have got 23 points out of a maximum of 25 and that’s a credit to the lads turning up to training, looking after themselves away from the club.
“It’s a credit to the squad effort as well. We don’t just use the same 15 players every week, there has been a rotation and we have tried to manage game time where we can, where we have the luxury of choice in positions.
“The two-week Christmas break will give us time to recover and in the second half of the season we have just two games at a time so it’s a bit easier to manage the group.”
Bournville will resume their league campaign with a first-ever visit to Forest of Dean club Drybrook on January 10 looking for a ninth straight win and their fifth away from Avery Fields.
“We said at the beginning of the season: let’s get to Christmas and see where we are at.
We are top at Christmas and we are more than halfway through the season,” Grove said.
“We haven’t taken any team lightly but we do firmly believe that if we look after what we are in control of and we can get our game on the field then we should win every game.
“The times we haven’t won is because we have diverted away from that.”
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