Loughborough Lightning will, for the first this season, play all their league games at cinch Stadium at Franklin’s Gardens. We sat down with wing Bo Westcombe-Evans, who shared her thoughts about that exciting prospect and the 2023/24 season as a whole – which got underway with a narrow 19-17 Allianz Cup defeat to Gloucester-Hartpury last weekend…
Q: What did the performance first up against the newly-crowned champions say about how far you’ve come as a team during the summer?
BWE: That game was very important for Lightning, coming off the back of last season and not finishing in a great position. We came into the Gloucester game with a completely new coaching team. A lot of the girls are still the same, but it has been a completely different environment inside training and I feel like Gloucester, being the team that they are, they’re very well known, winning the league last year. It was a big game for us first up and I really think the girls, all of us, really stood up and showed what Lightning are going to be about this season.
I know we didn’t win but the game was so close, especially in the second half, the girls really pulled through. We ran with intent, we managed to show Gloucester exactly what we’ve been doing over preseason, and that has put us in a really good place going into Saturday’s game. Obviously, there’s still work-ons that we’re focusing on, but it's a really good platform we can play off.
We all came in with a completely fresh start. Mentally, we are all in a great position to go out there. One of the main priorities for last Saturday was to not think about the score. Nathan [Smith, Lightning head coach] made a really good point; win or lose, it’s all about how we play and how we come across as a team. We really brought it last Saturday. It was a good start for us.
Q: You mentioned a change in environment, what has changed so much in the off-season?
BWE: Nathan has brought in a more professional environment to Lightning this season. The way we are treated, and the way training is treated, it’s a complete level up. The intensity is a complete level up. The discipline that is expected from us is a complete step up.
The girls have really risen to the challenge. I feel like it has shown through how we performed especially in the second half against Gloucester. It’s exciting because I feel like as a team there’s so much more that we’ve got and what we can do. Especially during this Cup period, there’s a lot that we can do and we can go for.
Q: Lightning are currently operating without a large number of players who are away on international duty during the Allianz Cup period. How difficult has that been to manage when preparing for competitive games at the weekend?
BWE: We’ve handled it well. We’ve got three players that are in transitional contracts [Grace Clifford, Lilli Ives Campion and Daisy Hibbert-Jones]. So, they played in the Cup last weekend but they hadn’t been training with us for the majority of preseason because they’d been with England, and they came in and trained with us Thursday prior to the game. They slotted in perfectly to be fair. A lot of us know how each other play. They’ve been with England, but we’ve still got expectations that they fit into the system, and they came in and did exactly what they needed to do.
Q: This season Lightning will be playing all of their home games at cinch Stadium at Franklin’s Gardens. You tasted the experience last season, how excited are you to call this your home moving forward – starting with Saturday’s Double Header?
BWE: It’s amazing and such a privilege. This is our first time that Lightning have been given a stadium to play at. The atmosphere and the experience of being able to run out onto that pitch and play is amazing. The crowds that we get, especially from Double Headers when we get people staying to watch the women’s game, is so exciting. The adrenaline that you get as players when you’ve got all those people cheering for you. It’s such a step up from when we’re playing on the rubber crumb at Loughborough, to going down to Northampton and playing on the pitch because it is such a great feeling.
The excitement and the way the girls get hyped up in the changing rooms before to run out onto that pitch, it’s like no other feeling. It’s brilliant. Especially as this is the first Cup game that we will be playing, so a lot of these girls wouldn’t have played at a stadium as big as Northampton’s before. I feel like this is going to be a really exciting game and a really amazing experience for the girls who haven’t been able to play there so far. It’s a Double Header; we’ve got to show everybody at Northampton and Saracens exactly what we’ve been doing in this preseason block.
Q: How big a test will Saturday’s opponents Saracens present this Loughborough Lightning side?
BWE: It’s going to be a huge challenge, no doubt about that. Saracens are very physical, they’re very well structured. But I think we 100 per cent have the ability to go in there and break down their defence and their attack and play how Lightning play. If we go into this with our mentality and our structure that we’ve been drilling in training during preseason, there’s no doubt that Saracens will have a hard time containing us.