“I adore watching our teams play.”

Those are the words of Cirencester Rugby Club president Nick Theakston who has been counting down the days until the start of the new season.

Theakston has been president of the club for the past eight seasons and is looking forward to the ninth campaign as much as the previous eight.

“We’re all looking forward to the season, it’s clearly going to be very interesting,” he said.

Indeed it is because Cirencester are playing in a new-look division – Counties 2 Gloucestershire North – following the extensive restructuring of the leagues carried out by the RFU.

“We’ve gone up,” said Theakston. “We’ll be playing at Level 8 this season rather than Level 9, we were one of five clubs promoted from Gloucestershire One North.”

The four other clubs promoted with Cirencester are Smiths, Gordon League, Brockworth and Old Centralians 2nds and they’ll be locking horns with Cheltenham Saracens, Coney Hill, Hucclecote, Old Cryptians, Old Richians, Ross-on-Wye and Spartans in the 12-strong division.

Cirencester finished sixth in Gloucestershire One North last time out and Theakston readily admits “it wasn’t the most convincing of promotions”.

However, he is optimistic about the new campaign.

“If you analyse last season we had a pretty weak season up to Christmas, but after Christmas we challenged pretty much every team,” he said.

“We weren’t far behind the third-placed team and we gave Smiths, who were the champions, a really good game at their stadium.

“I think that’s a pretty good indication of where we are now, hopefully we’ll be challenging teams in every game we play.

“We’ve got a couple of players rejoining the club – flanker Archie Doyle and back row Matt Berry – so that’s great news, although we’re losing scrum-half Tommy Woodward.

“He’s taken his first teaching job in North London so hopefully he’ll be available in the holidays, he was excellent last season.”

Cirencester will again be captained Ollie Gibson, who plays in the second row or back row, and Theakston is a big fan.

“He’s a very solid rugby player, a very committed character,” he said. “He’s a very responsible person, a nice bloke.”

Theakston is just as impressed with coach Ashley Stephens.

“He’s an excellent coach, very hands-on,” he said. “He works for the RFU as a club developer for Gloucestershire, he knows what he’s doing.

“Andy Ramsey gives him a lot of support. Andy is known to absolutely everyone as ‘Rambo’, I don’t think too many people know his real name!”

Theakston is very agreeable to interview. He took time out from a family holiday in north Wales to speak to The Local Answer and it’s easy to see why he has held the position of president at Cirencester Rugby Club for so long.

So what does the role entail?

“I’m loosely involved in most aspects of the club, but I mean loosely,” he said. “I sit on the committee but I don’t coach and I don’t get involved on the playing side. There are much better qualified people than me.

“I work with the chairman, treasurer and other members of the committee on matters that need to be resolved but I am involved very much as a non-executive.

“My role involves mainly being a representative of the club, welcoming people, that sort of thing.

“Cirencester is very much a club of volunteers, we are entirely dependent on our home-grown players coming through our minis and juniors.”

Fortunately, the club have a thriving minis and juniors set-up and Theakston, who along with his three brothers is a director of well-known northern brewery company Theakston, says the club are thriving as a whole.

“We have a 2^nd team playing matches most weeks, they are a good bunch of rugby people, I enjoy watching them play,” he said. “They were quite successful last season, they are very enthusiastic and are quite often over-subscribed.”

Off the field, things are looking good too with Theakston saying that the club are in an “excellent financial state”.

There’s plenty going on at the club too.

“We’re hoping to install floodlights at some stage in the future,” said Theakston, who lives just outside Cirencester. “This summer we’ve refurbished the downstairs changing rooms and we’ve completely refurbished the kitchen.

“We had 186 people sit down for our annual vets’ night in June when Ben Kay was our guest speaker and we also hosted the Cotswold Lionesses summer camp this summer.”

That summer camp was to try to encourage more ladies to take up the sport and Theakston says the club are trying to establish and grow a women’s and girls’ section within the club.

If and when that happens Theakston will go and watch them play, of course. He’s a fan of all things Cirencester Rugby Club, having first got involved 20 years ago when the brewery that bears his name first started sponsoring the club, a sponsorship that continues to this day.

Originally from Yorkshire, he moved to this part of the world in the late 1990s after working in the City for a good number of years.

Now in his 60s, his playing days are very much in the past but, as you’d expect, he has very fond memories of those times, including playing with Harrogate and Nondescripts in Nairobi for whom he played his last game.

“I used to thoroughly enjoy it, although I was never a great player,” he said.

“I started on the wing, occasionally played in the centre before graduating to the back row. My final game was at prop, my size changed over the years!”

But while he was never a top player, his brother Tim, who lives in Chelworth, not far from Cirencester, was a very decent inside centre who played in the same Harrogate side as England stars Peter Squires and Roger Shackleton some 40 or 50 years ago.

Those were the days when rugby at all levels was very much an amateur game and while rugby has changed enormously since then, many of the values that characterised the game in decades gone by remain at grassroots level today.

And Nick Theakston absolutely personifies many of those values.

“The overall aim at Cirencester is for everyone to enjoy themselves, have fun and enjoy each other’s company,” he said.

“On the senior side, we want to get two teams out playing regularly and I will continue watching them whenever I can, they’re all terrific chaps.”

It should be a good season!