Home sweet home for Bassett (From This Is Wiltshire)

WOOTTON Bassett captain David Martin says his side must concentrate on their crunch home fixtures with teams in the bottom half of Southern Counties South for the remainder of the campaign.

Bassett ended a sequence of five successive defeats with a 23-14 victory over Oakmeadians at Ballards Ash on Saturday, leaving Martin & Co ninth in the table, 12 points clear of their second-bottom guests.

With seven games remaining of the term, the centre agreed that two victories should be enough to see Bassett clear of relegation danger. And with home games against lowly Supermarine and midtable Corsham and Weymouth to come, the skipper knows where Bassett’s season could be won or lost.

“We’ve obviously got to target the teams that are coming to us. Thankfully, some of the teams down our end are coming to us. That’s a real bonus and we’ve got to try to make that home advantage count in those crunch games,” he said.

“We’ve hosted a lot of the strong teams at home and come out as losers, which is a shame. But when you look at the season you would expect those stronger teams to prevail.

“There are a couple of sides who are just above us in the places and have got to come to us, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

“If we can scalp some points there then that would be great. At the moment we have targeted games.”

Dan Norcross and Phil Bardwell were on the scoresheet for Bassett on Saturday, as the hosts shot out of the traps and always kept a comfortable distance between themselves and Oakmeadians. However, Martin said the game wasn’t particularly pleasing on the eye.

“It was good to get a win. It was a game that we targeted after a few games panned out that we were struggling to get results,” he said. “You then have to start looking at sides who are also not picking up wins, so we targeted the game and we were looking to capitalise on them having lost to Supermarine just before Christmas.

“We had a strong pack out and we were able to get going fairly early. I think they still had the journey in them and we were able to score an early try.

“There was not a lot of continuity in the game and that kind of played into their hands. It was messy at the breakdown, there were lots of infringements from both sides and that played into their hands.

“We took kickable penalties because we knew the most important thing was getting the win. We were pushing for the fourth try because we’ve been struggling with bonus points but we couldn’t find that final finish, which was disappointing.”