WE arrived here in Penzance yesterday afternoon in plenty of time to get settled in and make sure we had an early night before tonight’s massive first leg of the Championship final against the Cornish Pirates.

The squad also sat down together with the coaching staff to go through the previous games we’ve played against Pirates and to have another look at what we’ve worked on in training this week.

It was obviously a disappointing performance by us in the semi-final win over Bedford Blues, so we are determined to put that right tonight.

Personally, I am massively excited to be back in the team — training has gone really well and it just feels great to be back involved.

I am no good at watching Warriors games and I have had enough of that this season, so it is great to be a part of the team once again.

Tom Arscott has been fantastic and has had some really solid games while I was out of the team — the boys were able to play with confidence with him at the back.

It is testament to him as a player, but that probably won’t mean too much to him now as he has had to make way for me, but he is a good team guy.

There’s not a lot I can say to him, but he will have spoken about the decision with the people at the club and there has been no difference in the way he has trained this week.

We are expecting a hugely physical test from the Pirates. They are a big, strong team with a decent pack and they will be massively up for it.

I believe we will go into the game as underdogs as they are full of confidence on their home pitch and will be looking to turn us over, so it will be an interesting match.

We know what we can expect from them, but hopefully we can negate how they play with what we have done in training.

In an ideal world, we would like to put the tie to bed in the first leg but, as we saw with Bristol last year, it can be deadly to lose the first game by a few points and have to turn that over in the second leg.

The banter in our camp has been very good this week —the lads were a little bit down after the semi-final because of the way we played, but they soon picked themselves back up again.

Our squad is full of big-game players — we’ve got plenty of full internationals as well as players who experienced playing in a two-legged final in the Championship last year.

As a group, we really are in a good place ahead of tonight’s first leg of the final.