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Players

• Stuart Hooper

Throughout the 2005-06 rugby season, Leeds Tykes and Northampton Saints stars, Stuart Hooper and Sean Lamont, will be keeping you up to date with life in modern rugby.

In a weekly diary, Sean and Stuart, will tell you of their experiences in the Guinness Premiership, in Europe and hopefully, on the international stage.

In his first entry, Stuart Hooper, newly appointed as captain of the Tykes, looks ahead to the new season, alongside All Blacks scrum-half Justin Marshall.

It's time for the talking to stop and for the rugby to start.

We've had a very good pre-season with Leeds. It has been well arranged, with our fitness conditioners doing a lot of scientific work, which was well periodised, and by the time we take on London Irish on Sunday, we will be in top shape.

As part of our pre-season we went to France to play in the Issoire tournament. It was a very good experience but it felt very early to be playing rugby, as we were over there and it was still July.

But it proved an eye-opener, one that threw us out of our comfort zone and made us focus on the job ahead. The big thing on our return was to show improvement in our final game against Edinburgh, especially in the set piece, which we did, and we got the positive result too.

It will be a big relief to get the start of season underway - you can only do so much work, and ultimately we love playing rugby.

This season brings a massive honour for me personally as I will be captain of Leeds Tykes. I did it a bit at Saracens when I was 19, and again a couple of times last season for Leeds, but to do it from the start of this year is awesome. I only hope it brings the best out of me.

On another personal note, it is good also to have been named in England's Elite squad as part of the Senior National Academy after the Churchill Cup tour. But my real focus is playing for Leeds, because I believe that if a team does well, individuals prosper.

We saw that when a lot of our side, who finished well last year, were selected for England in the Churchill Cup, and we will keep the motto that we are a star team and not a team of stars.

Over the summer we have recruited a couple of big names and experienced players, in Justin Marshall and Gordon Bulloch, but we too have some good young talent coming through.

We have a good young scrum-half in Danny Care, who is in the Junior National Academy and I have been really impressed with centre Chris Rhys Jones, who we signed from Sale and has looked promising in pre-season. Both are players to look out for this season.

In Justin we have one of those guys that no matter what he does, people pay attention to him. You don't get 82 caps for the All Blacks without being able to influence a game and the people around you. He is a fantastic player and talker on the pitch, and he has come here to further his career - not just pick up his pension.

We have tried to put last season to bed, but have taken from our run at the end of the season that we can win under pressure and win when we have to.

With regards to our aims, we have done work with a company called Gazing Performance, and in a season where the competition you are playing in changes week on week - you switch from Premiership to Heineken to Powergen - we have learnt to take the best out of our run at the end of last season, when we only looked to the very next game.

With that in mind, we are thinking only of London Irish at Twickenham on Sunday. The chance to play at Twickenham is something you don't turn down and for many of our players it is the chance to return there after the success in the Powergen Cup final last season.

It is a whole new campaign though, a blank canvas. Irish have new coaches and some new players, and we are going into the unknown a little but it is going to be great to open up at Twickenham, finish talking and get on with the action.