Behind the scenes with West Wales Raiders Manager Peter Tiffin

Last week was a very busy week at the club, as most of you have already seen Stebonheath will be hosting this year’s World Cup qualifier where Wales face Serbia in a three team group in an attempt to qualify for the 2017 Rugby League World Cup finals in Australia. In addition to the home game against Serbia in Llanelli, Wales will travel to Italy a fortnight later. The winner of this group goes straight through to the finals with the runners up taking on the second place side from Ireland, Spain and Russia in a final challenge in Leigh on November 4th. We are very pleased as a club to have been chosen to host this massive fixture, we realise how much it can benefit West Wales both on and off the field. Since we found out that the game will be played at Stebonheath Park myself and Andrew Thorne have begun the process of breaking down all the areas that we need to focus on over the next couple of weeks, with an array of areas for local companies to be involved we shall be looking at contacting and visiting most over the month of April, if anyone would like to find out how they could be involved please contact myself on petertiffin@raidersrugbyleague.co.uk.

Last week also saw us creating links with Devon Sharks, through this link we arranged a home and away mini test to take place this season. With the Sharks looking at moving from their current league the South West League into the conference league in 2017, this will be a great opportunity for them to play against ourselves. Firstly the Sharks will welcome us to
Windmill Hill on Saturday 21st May and then the Devon Sharks travel to us to play in Stebonheath on Saturday 6th August. This shall be a great test for us as we already have a busy schedule with our fixtures in the Conference League South.

Over the weekend we also managed to catch up with a few of our close partners who have now become shirt sponsors for the season, we are looking forward to continuing our relationship with both Crossfit Llanelli & Spartan Fitness Equipment who shall be on opposite sleeves on our brand new claw strip for the 2016 season.