The Final Straw?
Cir Mhor thinks so...
 For me this was almost the final straw. I can forgive most things as long as I see passion and commitment from the players, but today I saw something that reminded me of the latter days of Nigel Melville, and it can’t be tolerated for any longer. Unless that bunch of players get a remarkable result against Wuss and then Wasps, a fair number of them must go, and Dean Ryan must go with them.
I’m wrong more often than I’m right with my predictions, but, sadly, I got this one spot on. We were weak at half-back and I don’t want to see either Lawson or Lamb in a Glaws shirt again. It’s an all-too-easy cop-out to blame Dean Ryan for Ryan Lamb’s demise, but the flaws lie in the young man’s temperament – he’s a Gloucester lad but he doesn’t look as though he cares enough for the club, his team-mates and the supporters. I didn’t like what I saw after the game at Northampton and I saw it again today – it seems as though he has been told to move on, and if that’s the case, I’m 100% in support of that stance.
Lawson’s different: he tries, but the hard fact is that he simply isn’t good enough – the charge down of the early box-kick was inevitable as he’s as slow a 9 as I’ve ever seen.
The three-quarters also aren’t good enough. Watkins is a trier, and he clearly hurts when things go wrong, but he’s no winger. Foster has scored almost identical tries against Northampton and Cardiff, but defensively he hasn’t got it, and his attitude, in my opinion, is too much like Ryan Lamb’s – a bit of obvious hurt wouldn’t go amiss. Sinbad is a winger and goodness knows what he’s doing at 13 – he also, sadly, looks painfully slow at present and we can only assume that he has some sort of a physical problem.
Allen is supposedly off to Leicester and on recent performances, that can only strengthen us and weaken the Tigers. If we can field Balshaw, Tindall, Barkley and Sinbad we have a chance, but more often than not we can’t, and the replacements aren’t up to the job – cruel but true. Olly Morgan was excellent, but I thought he whinged to Rolland about his imagined block, and that’s something that needs to be knocked out of him.
The front five did OK today but no more. Wood and Somerville were solid, as usual, but Azam looked ponderous – I suspect that at his age he needs to be handled carefully and given rests between games. James tried but was back to his old problem of not making the ground his size suggests he should, and while Alex Brown tries his heart out, he made precious little impact on the Cardiff line-out,
Our strength in depth in the back-row was cruelly exposed. Narraway has gone so far off the boil that tepid is the way to describe him, and Qera looks about as unfit as a Premiership player can be – there may be some who see him as a 7, but for me he ’s the spitting image of a 6. Gareth Delve gave it his best shot but made little ground, and his captaincy skills looked to me to be exposed.
Dean Ryan has made some curious calls on selection this season and today they bit hard. Talking to a couple of Welsh ‘greats’ after the game they couldn’t make sense of not starting Cooper who would have been desperate to impress against his new club – when he came on he immediately looked sharper than Lawson.
Starting Sinbad at 13 is a disaster – it’s naiveté of the worst sort to imagine that because he gets more ball there then that’s got to be good – because he has neither the kicking or handling skills, or the size, of a good 13. Watkins, who is a decent enough 13, isn’t a  winger, so why start him there?
And then there’s the decision to omit Hazell. For me it’s a huge insult to someone who would give everything for the club. When Qera was at his best last season he was magnificent and deserved his place on merit – in recent weeks he has been picked on the basis of sentiment, and it stinks. He was poor today and was shown up by what Haze did in his seven minute cameo – sadly we’ve now lost our best 7 for the rest of the season.
I have some sympathy for Dean Ryan as, within what is clearly a limted budget, he has tried to bolster up his squad by adding players who offer greater physicality. For example, after the loss at Twickenham two seasons ago, he recruited Big Les, but has lost him for most of this season. It’s also a fact that every time we get to a critical game, Tindall seems to get a sick note – he’s a pivotal figure for us. So is the arch-organiser and finisher, Balshaw, and we miss him terribly.
However, injuries are a fact of life, and who recruited the replacements? Leicester, albeit with more money at their disposal, have an ethos where their stand-ins seem to seamlessly slot into things – maybe a few more fights at training is what we need, as it at  least shows that players care..
Ryan’s other weakness is too much loyalty to his players and to his coaching staff – some will say that Lamb’s decline is down to the coaches, but I think the club has been too loyal to him, giving him repeated chances when it has now become clear he has neither the temperament or the ability to make it at the highest level – a smarter coach would have sent him on his bike a while ago.
Similarly, serious questions need to be asked about Dean Ryan’s coaching team – he brought them to Glaws and, in my opinion, he should have sent some of them packing some time ago – if a former great scrum-half like Redpath  can’t see Lawson’s limitations, or get the best out of Cooper, then, ‘Houston, we have a problem’.
I fear for us on Tuesday against Wuss and the only thing that stops me saying that the coaches must be changed is that it would be pointless ahead of the final two games. Nothing short of nine points from those matches will keep me out of the ‘Dean Ryan must go’ camp.
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