Chinnor

Thame is a market town in Oxfordshire that has never had a professional sporting tenant of any size beyond its rugby club. Frank Angel, Cyril Perry and Marcus Cann put the club together in 1962 over a conversation at the Bird in Hand pub, and the first fifteen took the field a year later.

Kingsey Road holds around 3,000, with 560 under a covered stand, and it was there that the club's biggest test in generations played out. Nick Easter, capped for England as a number eight, took over as Director of Rugby in December 2022 and inherited a squad still playing at the fourth tier. Two seasons on, Chinnor won 22 of their 26 league games, ran up 1,039 points, and sealed the National League 1 title with a 52-0 win over Birmingham Moseley, sending the club into the RFU Championship, one step below the Premiership, for the first time.

Before that jump, the honours board read as a county club's should: five Oxfordshire RFU County Cups between 1977 and 2011, a run of Oxfordshire Cups either side of 2010, and a first promotion to National League 1 via the play-offs in 2018 that set up the later title. Tom Varndell and Tom Johnson both went on from Chinnor to play for England, a rare thing for a club of this size to produce twice over. The derby against Rams RFC still matters more locally than anything on the Championship fixture list, and the club's academy, the first under-19 setup either county could claim, has been feeding players through for years.

None of that changes what Chinnor now face: a Championship built for clubs with far deeper squads and budgets, and a first season there still to be survived.