Coming off the back of their third consecutive win the ever-improving Cherrypickers hope to close the gap on Albury who sit just two points ahead of them on the ladder.

On taking into account a number of factors, captain-coach Neil Thorman said Young is in a good position ahead of the Round 7 match.

“At the moment there’s a couple of positives coming out of it for us with Albury coming off the back of a loss and obviously we have three distant wins behind us so we’re playing with a bit of confidence,” Thorman said.

“But in saying that they’re a good outfit, they’re ahead of us on the ladder and we can’t be as complacent as we were against Brothers and how we allowed them get back into the game due to our errors and poor penalty count.”

Thorman has acknowledged the weekend’s match as a critical time for the ‘Pickers as he reflected on his season plan of gaining a comfortable position early in the competition.

“We need to keep bridging that gap between sixth and seventh to keep the playoffs in reach,” he said.

“It’s how I wanted to start the season off, I didn’t want us to be chasing our tail at the end of the season and rely on other teams winning or us winning so many games in a row to secure a spot, it’d be nice to stay in that region.” 

While Thorman has noted the absence of Albury hooker Andrew Smith and props Andrew Cowhan and Jack Watson, he said Young must break some bad habits if they’re to perform to their full potential.

“We have to give less silly penalties away,” he said.

“We sometimes go away from our game plan - we pretty much have the best prop partnership in the league with Kyle Richens and Aaron Slater and we often stop using that and we’ll go wide too early before we actually have our goforward.

“So when it breaks down we need to go back to our basics, get our goforward and let James Woolford start leading the forwards around the field.”

Along with the expected yet uncertain arrival of two French signings, Thorman said Blake Hewitt will bring quite a lot of strike off the bench as shown in his performance against Wagga Brothers last week.

The last time Young and Albury met was at Greenfield Park in 2015 when Young took a 36-24 win over the Thunders, meanwhile in 2014 Albury defeated Young 22-10 at Alfred Oval.

But wasting no time in the past, Thorman is relatively happy with the team’s positioning at this stage of the competition. 

“We can’t really look back too much into how we started in our first three games, but we are thereabouts where I wanted to be on completing our first six games and it is an improvement from last year,” he said.