Aberdeen Grammar fixtures will be an opportunity for Highland to show level of progress, says Chisholm
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Highland Rugby Club will be looking to even the score against one side in particular next season, according to director of rugby Iain Chisholm.
Scottish Rugby released the fixture list for a new-look 2020/21 season last week, with the usual pyramid system abandoned for one year in favour of a more regionalised league structure starting next month.
That means that in the first stage of competitive rugby, Highland will be playing the three closest teams to them from the usual Premiership and National One home and away – Stirling Wolves, Dundee, and Aberdeen Grammar.
Grammar are the only Premiership outfit of the group, but they did face Highland in April 2019 in the National League Cup final in Stirling.
On that occasion, the trophy did not come back to Canal Park, but it proved a valuable learning opportunity as Highland continued to develop while rising through the ranks of the club game in Scotland.
So for Chisholm, renewing acquaintances with Grammar will be an opportunity to prove to everyone how much progress they have made in the last 18 months.
“We’re looking forward to getting after Aberdeen Grammar,” he explained.
“Those guys set a marker for us when we got beaten by them in the League Cup final.
“That loss told us what we had to work on. We looked at our front row and thought we maybe needed a bit more running volume in them, we needed to do a bit more scrummaging with them technically.
“We have made tweaks to our game, and we think that we might not match them physically because they are a big side, but we can move them around the park and try and play at our tempo.”
Highland are due to host Aberdeen Grammar in Inverness on Saturday, November 14, but will play Stirling at home in the opening match of the campaign and Dundee away before then.
Read the full edition of today's Inverness Courier here.
