With representative stars backing up and injuries mounting at Albury, Young coach Neil Thorman is hoping the timing is right for the Cherrypickers to move into the top five.
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If Young win by nine points or more on Sunday they will move around the Thunder on the Group Nine ladder.
Thorman is confident his team will have the weapons to tackle an understrength Thunder outfit.
Albury will be without forwards Andrew Cowhan, Andrew Smith and Jack Watson and also have captain-coach Ben Jeffery, Dave Cowhan and John Huggett backing up from Riverina duties on Saturday.
Young prop Aaron Slater is also in the representative game, but Thorman believes they have plenty of advantages heading into the game.
“We are hitting them at that right time with their injuries, them having to travel and us coming off their consecutive wins,” Thorman said.
“Even though they are coming off the back of a loss against a strong Southcity they are a decent outfit.
“They’ve got experience around the park all be it with potentially three players out so we are hitting them at a reasonable time.”
After a poor start to the year under the rookie coach, the ‘Pickers have gained plenty momentum coming off three straight wins.
After just escaping with the win over Brothers with 30 seconds to go left week, Thorman wants a more complete performance.
“We need to cut out a couple of our errors,” he said.
“We let Wagga (Brothers) in last with silly penalties, one resulting in getting 10 in the bin. They are our errors that we need to cut out.
“We also got scored on a little too much and need to get back to a decent defensive performance.
“I think that will win this game as we have a quite natural scoring abilty.”
The Cherrypickers come into the clash with their strongest team, however their squad is set to expand.
Their two French recruits, Lilian Albert and Geoffrey Zava, have completed their seasons at home and are expected to arrive within the week.
The Cherrypickers have also picked up two Fijian outside backs.
They will play their first games on Sunday and are set to come off the bench in reserve grade.
Meanwhile, Jeffery said the message had been simple at training after last weekend’s loss to premiership favourite Southcity.
“Our completion rates have to go up and our defence must be better,” Jeffery said.
“I thought we were pretty good for 20 minutes last week and then we let some really soft tries in.
“That was disappointing.”
