On Saturday the Bears ramped up their pre-season preparations with an impressive 42-4 disposal of local rivals Oxford at the Butts Park Arena.

Following the victory captain Richie Hughes spoke to coventrybears.com about the game and how he felt it went.

The hooker, who is now in his second season with the Bears, is taking part in his first full pre-season with the club having spent the early part of last season recovering from a knee injury.

Speaking on the victory he said; “I thought overall our performance was much improved from last Sunday.”

“We built a solid platform in the middle early on that our outside backs then exploited scoring some well worked tries.”

Despite his pleasure in the first half performance Hughes did state that the second half performance could have been better for the team.

“A few errors early in the second half allowed them to get a foothold back in the game but to only concede one try after gifting them a lot of possession was pleasing.”

Following the defeat to Rochdale Hornets last week the team needed to work on a number of areas if their performance was to improve against Oxford. This is an area which the Widnes native pointed out as being a major part of Saturday’s success.

“We had a chat early in the week and worked on a couple of key areas we felt let us down at training which I felt for the most part we put in place.”

Hughes will now lead the team into next weeks Ipro Sport Cup fixture against University Of Gloucester All Gold with a hope to build on Saturday’s performance and a view to progressing to the second round of the cup.