SWINDON take a step into the unknown this weekend, as they travel to Tewkesbury in the WEPL Glos/Wilts Division.

The two teams have rarely met down the years and were both promoted into Glos/Wilts last season. For Swindon captain Liam Tucker it is an exciting chance to play at a new ground against mystery opposition.

And he’s ready to think quickly once he gets into the field, saying: “We know very little. I think one of our players might have played there as a young boy but other than that I don’t know of many who have played there for a long while. They come up with a good record and they got promoted, as we did.

“It will be two teams who don’t know a great deal about each other, so it should be a good game of cricket.

“A lot of sides in Glos/Wilts now play each other year in and year out and so you know where the batsmen hit their balls, which bowlers bowl tightly, which bowlers you can target. We go to Tewkesbury and you have to adapt on your feet. We need to work things out quickly rather than doing a lot of forward planning.

“That works both ways. I doubt they’re going to know where our batters hit the ball and what our bowlers do. It’s nice to go to different places where we haven’t played cricket.”

Tucker wants his players to make the most of the momentum generated by what he described as a “bonus win” over Chipping Sodbury last Saturday, on an afternoon where much of the region’s cricket was wiped out by the weather.

“Last week was a bit of a bonus,” he said. “We all woke up on Saturday morning and no one was expecting to play, we were travelling and we still weren’t expecting to play and it was raining when we got there. To get a game in when no one else did is a real bonus win. Everyone else was picking up five points and we managed 18.”

Jake Goodwin is expected to be with Hampshire Academy but otherwise Tucker has a full-strength squad available.