DANNY BROWN is targeting a top-half finish as he looks ahead to the biggest year in Darlington Mowden Park’s history.

In March, England Women will take on Scotland in a Six Nations game in Darlington as part of a televised double-header that will also see England Under-20s take on their Scottish counterparts. Then, in the autumn, the All Blacks will use The Northern Echo Arena as a training base as they attempt to defend their Rugby World Cup trophy.

In between times, Mowden will finish their first season in National League One, and having won their last three matches, they head into tomorrow’s home game with Esher in seventh position in the table.

If they can remain there, they will achieve their highest-ever finish in the rugby pyramid, and first-team coach Brown is determined to maintain his side’s current momentum over the remaining 11 matches of the campaign.

“I’d like to try to finish in the top half of the table if we can,” he said. “I think that would be a really good sign of where we’ve got to as a club and where we are now in this league.

“We’re on a good run at the moment, but the league is so tight that a couple of defeats can quite quickly take you back down there to third bottom.

“That said, if you’d had said at Christmas that we’d be going into this game with Esher a point above them in the table, I’d definitely have taken that as a Christmas present.

“It’s about trying to stay there now though and making sure that what we do on the pitch feeds into what is going to be a very big year for us.

“It’s one of those times at the minute where you have to pinch yourself to make sure things are really happening. All my Emails at the minute seem to either be from the RFU about the international double-header or Rugby World Cup 2015 about the All Blacks. They’re both massive things we’ve got coming up, but we can’t take our eye off the ball in terms of the day job on the field.”

Having won promotion to National One last season, Brown freely admits it took his players some time to get to grips with life at a higher level.

Six of the club’s opening eight matches ended in defeat, but since then things have improved markedly, with Mowden’s form since the turn of the year more than justifying their position in the top half of the table.

“It’s no criticism of any of the guys, but maybe at the start of the season, there was a belief that this league would be like the league we were playing in last year,” said Brown. “It isn’t.

“Last year, once we were ahead, we pretty much stayed there. In general, there was no one to capitalise on our errors. Now, if we make a mistake, the team we’re playing against generally profit from it.

“You only have to look at the away game down at Esher to see that. We made two errors on their try line in the game, and they scored two tries of their own as a result.”

With no new injury problems to contend with, Mowden will start Andrew Cox, who has recently arrived from Australian side Parramatta Two Blues, at number eight with Guy van den Dries dropping down to the bench.