OUR home crowd will be huge in the first 20 minutes of tonight’s crucial second leg of the Championship play-off final at Sixways.

That opening quarter of the match will go a long way to settling the outcome of the match and the Warriors fans can have a huge impact by roaring us on as they always do.

The pressure will be pretty even on both teams, but who gets ahead early on will depend on who handles it the best.

If we can score early on the pressure will be heaped on Pirates.

However, they could start well and we could even find our nine-point lead wiped out, which would give them the upper hand.

In terms of the most important games I’ve played in my career, this one is right up there. There is a huge amount on the line for the club. This one game will determine the foreseeable future for the club, but we cannot let that overwhelm us and, personally, I won’t let that happen.

We have to keep calm and make sure we do what we do well.

There has been a mixture of tension, excitement and anticipation in our camp since the first leg of the final.

We were initially disappointed after the game in Cornwall, but the guys are all fully focused on tonight’s task in hand.

It has been quite an interesting situation having a week-long half-time interval, but that has given us the opportunity to look back at the first leg and see what we did wrong, what we did well and put together our game plan for tonight’s huge match.

Looking back at the game in Penzance, we were quite disappointed with how we performed — obviously, it is good to be ahead in the tie, but we didn’t do ourselves justice.

We are now very keen as a squad to go out there at Sixways tonight and prove to Pirates that we deserve to go up.

This week we have largely focused on ourselves — rather than the Pirates — and making sure we all do our jobs right.

They do have some very good individuals in their team and we will have to look after Gavin Cattle and Jonny Bentley — the Pirates nine and 10 — as they run the game for them.

Tonight’s game is also a chance for us to say farewell to all of the guys who will be leaving Warriors and we want to give them the best possible send-off by winning.

This season in the Championship is something we all want to move on from — it has been a big learning curve for everyone at the club and we have come a long way as a team.

We must ensure we close the job off properly tonight. Not to do that would be devastating, but we won’t let things slip now.