KNUTSFORD Rugby Club are confident of holding their own in a higher division after a league reshuffle saw them promoted.

Blues will start next season in Division Three South of the North West Intermediate League – one level higher than they have been playing at.

They missed out on automatic promotion having finished behind Moore and champions Lymm fourths despite winning 17 of their 24 league matches.

That record has captain Sam Bensky believing they can compete well again in the league above.

While he admits a third successive promotion will “always be a goal,” the Blues skipper says they will set more permanent targets after the season kicks off.

“We think we can cope. There’s a couple of teams we know in the league above so we’re quite happy about that,” he said.

“We beat Moore twice last year, so I’m fairly confident we can keep up in that league.

“We wanted to keep rising through the Intermediate leagues, keep building as a team and raise confidence after a difficult few years.

“This is exactly where we wanted to be going. It would have been nice to get automatic promotion, but we’ll take this.

“It means we’ll be playing a better standard of rugby that’s more challenging.

“We’ll be pushing to be at the higher end of mid-table. I think we will know more about what is achievable after the first few games.

“It is hard to say until then, but we’re confident in our ability to not just hold our own but be successful in that league.

“As for promotion, that’s always going to be a goal but we’ll take a view on that as we get going.”

The restructure means Knutsford have been promoted in both of their seasons since leaving the RFU’s Northern Division.

While they had things mostly their own way last season, Bensky says they will need to adapt in several ways in order to succeed at a higher level.

“We’ll need to keep our organisation and keep going for 80 minutes,” he said.

“When we play in an organised fashion and we keep our shape and patterns, we’re very hard to beat.

“Where we’ve come unstuck is when we’ve let that go.

“We also need to not panic if things don’t go our way initially.

“We’ve found that we’ve been beating teams inside the first 20-25 minutes, but that’s not going to be the case this year.

“We’re going to have to work harder for longer.

“We’ll be playing more intelligent teams who are more likely to work us out, so we’re going to need some Plan Bs and Plan Cs in place.”