This Saturday the Blood and Sand head off to the Forest of Dean to play Cinderford, with the Wanderers playing Cinderford United. The third team will host Newmarket.
Cinderford is of course in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire on the banks of the Severn.
One of the more colourful characters to come out of Cinderford is the computer pioneer and potential Libertarian candidate in the US Presidential Election - John McAfee.
John's father was serving in the US Army during WWII and had married a local girl, and they settled in Virginia. He worked for NASA, Univac and Xerox before ending up at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the contracting companies that support the three latter agencies and who would later employ Edward Snowden. It was here he first came across the Brain computer virus and set about writing software to defeat them. He led McAfee Associates for seven years before selling up.
He moved to Belize, where he was arrested on drugs charges -he has been a leading advocate of decriminalisation. He was also named a person of interest in the death of Gregory Faull. He fled to Guatemala, where he was arrested for illegally entering the company. Belize dropped charges so he was deported to USA, where he was prosecuted for drunk driving. The IRS wanted to talk to him about tax irregularities - he claims they are illegal, he fled to Cuba.
But despite this he has still filed papers for the upcoming election - with campaign headquartered in Havana. This is his second attempt - he also ran in 2016. He is one of eleven candidates for the Libertarian nomination. The party got 3% of the popular vote in 2016, so even if nominated, he has little chance of reaching the White House.
This will be our seventh trip to Cinderford in the leagues - in the 10/11 season the match was postponed and then not played as it was a dead rubber. We won the first four, but lost the last two.
When Cinderford came to Cambridge, they played most of the match with 14 on the field - though the ball rarely got beyond the scrum half - as they kept the ball in the forwards and used their big pack to batter forwards. We led for most of the match, only to lose to a last minute try. And so compressed is the table, that last minute try is about all that stands between the two teams.
Cambridge will need to find an answer for the big Cinderford pack, but if we can get our hands on the ball we have the backs to cause problems and hopefully rack up our third victory in a row.
