Joe Gray Projects Toward 2024

It’s easy to say that for London Scottish and their Head Coach Joe Gray, 2023 was quite the rollercoaster. They finished the season in the bottom three of the Championship and managed to secure their league standing by winning the last three games of the campaign.

There have also been several highs and lows during the 2023–2024 season. London Scottish has scored in the last minute of each of their last four games, winning one and losing three. That one victory came against Ealing Trailfinders, the yearly champions and heavy spenders. London Scottish’s first since Ealing’s promotion to the Championship.

But late defeats to Hartpury and Cambridge have dulled the highlights of a year in which Joe Gray and his coaching staff have transformed this London Scottish squad.

“It has been a terrific break for the boys, clearly it was a challenging last month of the year with an enormous high of winning Ealing and then a number of pretty close losses,” Joe said upon returning to camp in 2024. In the space of roughly two rugby minutes, we lost three games.

The team’s focus since reuniting in the new year has been on applying the lessons learned and figuring out how to get better from generally excellent performances that were let down at crucial times.

“We’ve looked at a lot of various aspects, but ultimately over the previous eighteen months, as a group, we haven’t been ahead much,” Joe stated. Rather, we’ve been pursuing gaming, and we’re not too bad at it.

But it’s new for us to actually enter at halftime with strong leads. Subsequently, we started the second half a little loosely and brought games closer than they ought to be. We therefore just focused on the game strategy and how to apply pressure to the opposition while both creating and releasing pressure.

“We’ve looked at a lot of various aspects, but ultimately over the previous eighteen months, as a group, we haven’t been ahead much,” Joe stated. Rather, we’ve been pursuing gaming, and we’re not too bad at it.

But it’s new for us to actually enter at halftime with strong leads. Subsequently, we started the second half a little loosely and brought games closer than they ought to be. We therefore just focused on the game strategy and how to apply pressure to the opposition while both creating and releasing pressure.