East Kilbride Rugby Club boss Allan Steel expects his squad to back to full strength this weekend after a dozen players in Covid isolation forced them to postpone last week’s clash with Kilmarnock.
The virus ravaged much of the club rugby scene last week as sides were set to return from the festive break, but every match in East Kilbride’s West Region Division One was postponed due to Covid issues.
With 12 EK players ruled out, their match at home to Kilmarnock was called off and they now hope to travel to Stewartry on league business this weekend with a full compliment for their first game in almost a month.
Steel said: “We’re back training this week and hopefully get things back to normal.
“The SRU put out an email last week saying any clubs wanting to cancel their game due to Covid were allowed to and if you wanted to play the game and it was safe to do so, you could still do that as well.
”As it was, all the games in our division were off, but hopefully this week it’s back to normal and we can field a team to play Stewartry.
“The SRU did the right thing because most teams suffered over the Christmas period.
“We had 12 players isolating so we knew we weren’t able to get a team out on the Saturday.
“And everyone took the decision to stay home and stay safe last week.
“There’s going to be a few missing training this week due to their isolation, but by the weekend we could be up to full strength in terms of numbers.
“The boys haven’t played for almost a month now and a lot of guys have only done some wee home workouts, so Saturday will be a tester on the lungs, especially after Christmas and such a long layoff.
“We will prepare to play until told otherwise.”
Stewartry ran out 26-15 winners when the sides met at Torrance House in September last year and they sit third in the standings, one place above EK.
Steel felt his side threw the game away on that occasion and is hoping to put that right when they travel to Castle Douglas.
“Stewartry won the game at East Kilbride earlier in the season when I felt we should have won,” said the EK gaffer.
“We were in a position to win the game at half-time and I feel we still should have won the game. I was surprised we lost it but we made mistakes that cost us.
“It’s a really tough place to go. They’ve been a really good side the last few years, really pushing at the top end of the table but we’ll go down there with the belief that we can win the game.
“We feel we can and we’ll prepare to do that, and start the year well.”
Kick-off on Saturday is 2pm.
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