Hawick’s Darcy Graham available for Edinburgh’s second match of new United Rugby Championship season
Borderer Darcy Graham is expected to be available for Edinburgh’s United Rugby Championship game at home to Ulster this Friday after missing their season-opening 31-28 defeat away to Italy’s Zebre Parma on Saturday gone.
The capital city club had hoped to have the Scotland winger, out of action since sustaining an ankle injury on his British and Irish Lions debut against a First Nations and Pasifika XV in Australia in July, back for that away-day but it came just too soon for him.
The Hawick 28-year-old is now back in full training, however, and the club’s coaching staff are confident he’ll be ready for round two of the new season.
“Darcy Graham is in full training and seeing him buzzing around the field is great, and he’s available for selection,” said attack coach Scott Mathie.
Kick-off at the capital’s Hive Stadium against the Northern Irish outfit, 42-21 winners at home to Welsh side Dragons last Friday, is at 8.05pm and the hosts will be hoping it goes the same way as Ulster’s last visit in May.
That was the last match of last season’s regular fixtures and it yielded a 47-17 victory for head coach Sean Everitt’s hosts, earning them a play-off place, inspired by a Graham hat-trick, with Magnus Bradbury adding two tries and Ewan Ashman and Pierre Schoeman also touching down and Ross Thompson adding four conversions and Ben Healy another two.
Ulster were limited to unconverted tries by Werner Kok and Josh Postlethwaite and a penalty try.
Right-winger Graham was one of four Borderers fielded by Edinburgh that day, the others, all replacements, being Jedburgh’s Glen Young, West Linton’s Patrick Harrison and Melrose-born Charlie Shiel.
The two teams have met since, for a pre-season friendly in Belfast last month, and that went Ulster’s way by 31-19 against a visiting side featuring Young, Hawick’s Hector Patterson and ex-Melrose winger Ross McCann.
Looking back at those last two meetings, South African Mathie, 42, added: “You don’t want to show everything in your first game but we definitely got a good look at each other a few weeks back, so there’s some things there that we’ve seen.
“We also played them in the last game of last season, so I think it works both ways, but there’s definitely a lot that we’ve taken notice of.
“That last game in the URC shows you if you stick to the game model and you’re really accurate in what you do and how you want to go about the game that day, you get rewarded, so it’s a real good lesson and learning for us to be really accurate when it comes to that.”
Edinburgh are due to name their squad to face Ulster today.