Tom Anderson is keeping a close eye on the weather this week.

And no, Coney Hill’s captain is not looking to become the next Michael Fish or Ian McCaskill; it’s just that he wants to know the long-range forecast as he prepares for Saturday’s RFU Intermediate Cup South West Counties final at home to St Austell.

And while Anderson and his mates would be happy to take on the Cornish side in six inches of snow if needs be, he admits that he’s happy with the weather experts’ predictions for the next few days.

“It looks like it will be sunny,” said Anderson, “and that will suit us. To be fair our results in the last few weeks haven’t been quite what we wanted.

“It will be good to get on a dry wicket, spread the ball and run with it. We’ve got some good backs and quite mobile forwards who like to get their hands on the ball.”

Anderson admits that Coney Hill don’t know too much about St Austell other than what the Western Counties West table tells them which is clearly that they are a decent side.

They are second in the table behind St Ives having won 16 of their 20 games. The table also shows that in less than half of those wins have they picked up a try bonus point, while they’ve picked up three losing bonus points.

“I think they’ve got a bulky pack and a lot of their games are won by their forwards,” added Anderson.

“For us to win we’ve got to be firing on all cylinders, particularly in the forwards.”

Winning is what Coney Hill have been doing for much of the season, of course, even allowing for the fact that they’ve won one, drawn one and lost one of their last three league games.

They’ve been top of the pile in Western Counties North for pretty much all of the season and boast a playing record of 15 wins and one draw from their 20 games.

Cup rugby is different, however, and Anderson is aware if things go wrong on the day there are no second chances.

Not that he has any negative thoughts. “For the past month and a half we’ve been playing in second gear,” he said.

“If we get out of second gear and kick on it’s worrying for other sides in terms of how many tries we can score.”

Anderson said that the club had four targets at the start of the season – to go through the season unbeaten at home, have a good run in the national cup, win a Combination Cup and win the league.

They are still on course to complete a quadruple and their supporters – there’s sure to be plenty of them at Metz Way on Saturday – will be hoping that their run in the RFU Intermediate Cup continues because a win over St Austell will leave them just two games from a place in the final at Twickenham.

“We’ve never played at Twickenham before,” said committee man Simon Baldwin. “We reached the semi-final of this competition a few seasons ago but got beaten by Maidstone.”

Tickets on Saturday are £1 for members and £2 for non-members.