Cheltenham Civil Service captain and tighthead prop Ross Ruck will lead his side out at Westbury-on-Severn on Saturday for the start of an eight-game end-of-season run-in that will determine in which division the club will be playing their rugby next season.

Win them all and it’s pretty certain that by around 5pm on Saturday 6th April Service will be confirmed as champions of Gloucestershire Two North which in turn will ensure they are playing in Gloucestershire One next season.

Service’s final game of the season is at home to Tewkesbury and it could be a cracker because Tewkesbury have strong title aspirations of their own.

In fact, there is a fierce, four-cornered battle for the title with Fairford and Painswick also very much in the mix.

It couldn’t be tighter but while points – and wins – obviously matter, that is not the be-all and end-all for Cheltenham Civil Service head coach Paul Stickler.

Stickler took charge at the start of the season and has overseen a dramatic improvement in the flagship team’s results but while obviously pleased with the way things are going, he is determined not to get carried away by talk of promotion.

“People talk about promotion, but I’m only talking about performance,” he said. “If we perform between now and the end of the season it could all go down to that last game of the season.

“Is promotion important? Performance is more important. We will win promotion if we perform.”

He’s right of course and 55-year-old Stickler certainly knows what he is talking about because he hasn’t just played and coached the great game of rugby, he’s refereed as well.

A former fly-half or full-back, he was good enough to play for Bath United in the days when Jeremy Guscott, Richard Hill, John Hall, Simon Halliday and Stuart Barnes were coming through at the club.

“It was in the days when rugby was still amateur but I got told I was too small to play at the top level,” he said. “I’m 5ft 10in and they said they wanted 6ft players. Then the club signed Stuart Barnes from Bristol! Mind you, he was an exceptional talent and I wasn’t!”

A combination of work commitments – Stickler worked in the prison service – and injury saw him stop playing at the age of 24 and after a break from the game he took up refereeing.

Since moving to this part of the world, he has worked as assistant coach at Brockworth when Andy Wadley was in charge and also helped guide Cainscross to promotion when he was their head coach.

And while many at Service would be delighted if he could steer their club to promotion this season, Stickler is thinking much longer term than that.

“When I took this job I told the club that my vision and expectation had to match theirs,” he explained. “

“It’s about patterns of play, game management and performance. It’s about changing gameplans and training techniques. Without the players buying into it, we wouldn’t have had any success. It’s down to them, not me.

“This is a journey I want to be on and the club have been 100 per cent supportive, both the committee and the players.”

That journey could just take them all the way to the Gloucestershire Two North title this season, of course, and as Stickler says: “If we do win the next eight games it will be a good end of season party!”

Fairford, meanwhile, host Cainscross on Saturday, while Tewkesbury travel to Gloucester All Blues and Painswick visit Norton.

Service fans will also have two further dates ringed in their diaries because the club entertain Fairford a week on Saturday and Painswick on 9th March.