Guinness Premiership - 2 January, 2010
Gloucester 13 - Worcester 13
Late Late Attwood Strike Saves Blushes
It’s amazing how different people see games in very different ways. I’m sure that there will be those who take the result at face value: a draw at home against genuine relegation candidates, so sack everyone involved with Gloucester Rugby. However, my view – and it’s just one man’s opinion – is at odds with the serially pessimistic view that tends to prevail nowadays on Shedweb.
Gloucester should have had the bonus point inside the first 30 minutes, and would then have gone on to win by a country mile. Despite the result the gulf in class between the two sides was huge: Wuss defended very well, and when we made our defensive errors, took their two chances in a professional manner, but they offered virtually nothing in attack. Their game plan was defend and then hoof the ball away – to call it limited is an understatement. They were, and again it’s just one view, truly dire, and I believe that they will more than likely be the team that gets relegated from the GP. How Mike Ruddock can coach such rubbish from what is on paper a talented bunch of players has to be one of life’s mysteries.
To my eyes Gloucester played with more freedom than in the past. It seemed to me as though Bryan Redpath and the other coaches had taken off the shackles and decided to let the players play. Glaws ran at Wuss right from the start and created several good scoring opportunities. Qera’s solo try was exactly that, a solo effort, but there were other much better team opportunities that were wasted. E F-S just had to touch the bottom of the post and he would have scored, and a lovely move on the right wing ended with the ball going to ground. There were others too, and Wuss hardly produced anything that constituted a threat in the first half hour.
Nicky Robinson place kicked badly – get over it, it happens from time to time – but I thought he controlled the game really well in the first half. He made a couple of very high-class breaks, kicked well from hand, and looks a much better player when the team is allowed to play. There are some that still praise the departed Willie Walker but we saw exactly what we’re missing, and it’s not a lot. He’s a lovely bloke but a journeyman at stand-off and his place kicking isn’t the totally reliable tool that some would have us believe – if it had been then Wuss would have been two scores ahead with 20 minutes to go.
The disappointment for me was the Gloucester pack. The series of scrums that led to the second Wuss try exposed us cruelly, and there are those who know much, much more about what was going on than I do, but it was no coincidence that Nick Wood went off after half-time – he’d been carrying an injury from very early on - and Somerville does better when he has Dave Attwood packing down behind him. At the breakdown too we came off second best and I lost count of how many times we got turned over by those horrible Worcester forwards. However, the fact is that none of that should have mattered as we should have been out of sight on the scoreboard by then – remember we came top of the league without any semblance of a line-out a couple of years ago. The old adage that forwards win matches doesn’t always hold true and this was one game where it should have been disproved.
It’s fashionable to knock King Carlos…you know the stuff – a light of former days, what has he brought to the club, and so on. Well I thought that he produced a wonderful cameo when he came on. Nicky Robinson had tried and tried, but the score wasn’t coming, and Spencer delivered a wonderful seven minutes that tied us the game. His passing was flat and very fast, and his cross-field kick was a change of tactics that very nearly worked. There is most definitely life in the old dog yet!
Positives from the game for me were the performance of Tim Molenaar when he came on, and yet another very good game from Scott Lawson. ‘Brush’ revealed that Molenaar is 10kg lighter that when he was playing in NL1, and he was unstinting in his praise for the player’s second-half performance, “Worcester work off a massive drift defence and Tim brought directness and punctured their line on several occasions. If you allow them to force you out to the wing then they’ve solved the problem, so we had to hit them in the 13 area.”
Lawson has been consistently good while Olly has been away and he was excellent against Wuss. He’s quick, has good hands, and seems to think he’s an outside centre on occasions! The trick for BR now is to integrate Olly back into the set-up without switching Lawson off – they’re very different hookers but that should be to our advantage.
So, you pays your money and you makes your choice: more mediocrity from Glaws, or a really good performance that didn’t get the reward it deserved. I’m certain of one thing though: Glaws are not, repeat not, relegation candidates and I’ve far from given up hope of Heineken Cup rugby next season.
Finally, with all of the daft speculation about players out of contract, can anyone who was there call into question the commitment of a single player wearing a Cherry and White shirt (or indeed a Wuss one)? I thought this was a ferociously competitive GP game – exactly what makes it the best league in the world, bar none. Happy New Year. |
