Guinness Premiership - Saturday 328th November, 2009
Harlequins 35 Gloucester 29
SO NEAR, YET SO FAR (again)…
So near and yet so far: this was a game where the ‘glass half full’ and the ‘glass half empty’ merchants both had something to take home with them. If you’re in the former camp than you’ll have seen what you believe to be more green shoots of recovery from Glaws, but if you’re of a more negative mindset you can latch on to yet more missed tackles that cost us a game we could (and should?) have won.
Glaws started well and tries from Delve and Sharples gave us the edge, with the second of them proving that Mike Brown truly is the slowest full-back in the Premiership! However a Quins try and some Evans penalties meant that our led was a narrow one, but we just knew in our bones that we’d give away another try before half-time because that is the Glaws way, and right on cue we did. The Quins tries were, frankly disgraceful, and if the spotlight has for now moved off Carl Hogg, it’s firmly on Dennis Betts. Yes, our backline is a cobbled together one, and has some youngsters in there, but that’s hardly an excuse for the kind of soft tries we are shedding – it’s not a new phenomenon, remember Wasps away?
We saw another Gloucester failing when the team came out half asleep after the interval, and were immediately under severe pressure. A Quins line-out resulted in Nick Easter being able to simply stroll over – another perfectly avoidable try. Quins fourth came when the excellent Danny Care, who’d been a thorn in our side all afternoon, cut us apart yet again. When teams take quick penalties and run at us, as Joe Simpson did for Wasps, and Care and Easter did all day on Saturday, we struggle badly. If we have time to organise our line we can defend well at times, but pace and guile seem to catch us out every time.
To the lads’ credit, although it seemed as though the game was gone, they came back hard at Quins – it would have been easy to roll over at that point, but they didn’t. With Quins down to 14 men, Sharples scored in the corner, and we could easily have won it at the end when Qera made a trademark charge but didn’t pass the ball left when there would have been a two on one. I’d have taken a losing bonus point before the game, but in the end I felt we deserved more.
However, I reckon Quins, after a poor start, are a much better side than their league position implied. They play attractive rugby, with a decent pack and a very sharp back line, and I reckon time will show this to be not a bad Glaws performance.
The young half-back partnership of Burns and Lewis showed us that it will, in time, be a good one, but it also demonstrated how raw both players still are. In particular, Lewis’s pass, although much quicker than Lawson’s, was all over the place – let’s hope that ‘Brush’ keeps working hard with him as it needs to become much more consistent. The difference between the sides was the pace that their 9 and 10 put on the game, but considering they are a full England international and an experienced All Black, and our lads are 19 and 20, that’s hardly surprising.
Of all the gin joints in all the world… With all of those empty seats at The Stoop, I ended up sitting next to a fellow Shedwebber who illustrated just how differently we all see the game. He bollocked me (light-heartedly – I think) about being unkind about Rory Lawson, and he and I see Greg Somerville in very different ways – he spent the afternoon telling me after every scrum that Somerville was our weak link and shouldn’t be playing at tighthead! I guess we all have our favourites!
The Gloucester line-out deserves a mention, as Dave Attwood on Twitter suggests it was a 100% performance – I wasn’t taking stats but I can’t recall us losing one. In the scrum the Quins pack is a big one but Glaws held their own. I thought Delve had a really good game – after a dip in form he looks to be coming back to his best, and Attwood had another fine game – does he ever have anything else? Poor old Will James looked as though he will be out for a while – on first appearances it looked as though his right ankle or leg had gone, and he was stretchered off with it splinted.
It was good to see Olly Morgan back, and once he got rid of the rust he looked really good. If we can ever get a backline where Morgan plays, Tinds is in the centre, and Sinbad is on the wing, with the pack’s new-found confidence we can take some unfortunate team apart!
I’d have been happier with five points – that really would have showed that the season had been turned round – but come the end of the season a losing BP might not look too bad.
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