Supporters of Drybrook’s South West One West high-fliers won’t exactly need Sat Navs to find their way to the club’s Mannings Ground on Saturday, but when Ben Large leads the team out against Teignmouth at 2.30pm it will be the first time he has done so on home soil since 2nd December.

Since then they’ve been hampered by the weather and played only one further game – a 36-17 win at Matson the following week.

It means that when they tackle the team from South Devon in four days’ time they will not have played for more than a month.

“It’s nice that it’s a home game first up, hopefully it will be a good one to get back into” admitted Chairman Chris Rawlings. “But the lads have kept busy, going to the gym or the sports hall when the games were called off.”

Drybrook’s home game against North Petherton on 16th December was called off due to snow, and their match at Okehampton on Saturday was postponed because the Devon club’s pitch was flooded.

Both games have now been rearranged with North Petherton heading to the Forest of Dean on 10th February and Drybrook heading down the M5 to Okehampton 14 days later.

Drybrook’s inactivity has allowed table-topping Exeter University to steal a march on their main rivals and they now have a 13-point lead, albeit they have they have played two more games.

“It is what it is,” said Rawlings. “There’s nothing we can do about it and it means we’ve now got a run of eight or nine games without a break.”

Indeed they have with the ninth game in that run being at Exeter University on Saturday 10th March.

“The good thing is that we play our two games in hand before we play at Exeter,” said Rawlings. “Ideally we need two bonus point wins from those games to keep right behind them. There is also still a decent gap between ourselves and the teams behind us.”

Only the team that finishes top are guaranteed promotion at the end of the season with the runners-up facing a play-off game against the second-placed team in South West One East.

Second-placed Drybrook, who have won their last 12 league games after losing their opening match of the campaign against fierce rivals Newent, inflicted the only defeat on Exeter University this season, beating them 27-18 in mid-November.