Brilliant Balsh Saves Gloucester's Blushes
Cir Mhor is not a happy chappy...
 At half-time we stood up and the general flavour of the conversation was ‘Is this the worst game of professional rugby you’ve ever seen?’ It was turgid stuff riddled with handling errors and a total lack of flair.
How can players of the quality of our Gloucester squad turn out such total rubbish? It was typified by Rory Lawson – an international scrum-half – failing to catch a high ball when he had aeons of time and was totally unchallenged. Where his mind was, goodness knows, but it wasn’t on playing for Glaws.
He wasn’t alone in that as too many of our players seemed simply to be going through the motions – a half-empty Kingsholm didn’t help but, for all the fine words during the week, this was a team with a serious hangover after the Cardiff shambles.
Confidence is clearly low at present and it’s hard to know what is at the heart of this. The Ryan knockers – and there’s a bandwagon gathering pace there – will surely point the finger at him, but there are enough internationals around in our squad who should be able to at least deliver an acceptable performance.
 The game was changed by Iain Balshaw and his bloody-mindedness that seemed to say ‘I’m just not having this any more’. He ran from deep – presumably he was made to do 500 press-ups afterwards as a punishment for his breach of ethics – and he single-handedly lifted the team.
He also saved our bacon later on with a try-saving tackle on the left wing and, not for the first time in his Glaws career, he gave an exhibition in how to coolly time the hit when you’re the last line of defence – Olly Morgan please take note.
There were some other good points to the game. When Rory Lawson’s nightmare eleven minute cameo thankfully came to an end, young Dave Lewis came on and played a blinder – it would be easy to focus on a few errant passes but he showed energy, commitment, and was very quick to get the ball away. Lesley Vainikolo was used properly and showed that when he receives the ball at pace ten yards out he’s still a very hard man to stop.
 Haze showed why we need a genuine openside, throwing himself into horrible places with his usual disregard for personal safety, and Marco was much more his old self – when he’s at his best he gets nasty, and he couldn’t have been more up for it on Saturday. Despite the latest round of criticism of Tindall, he made the hard yards many times, and without him our defence has always looked fragile – can someone tell me please, does Olly Barkley do tackling?
The best point of course – and it’s the most important in any game although some of our purist friends would have you believe otherwise – is that we won and now look good for a semi-final spot.  The Anglo-Welsh Cup might be a bit of a joke, but I’d still rather we were in it than out of it.
Finally, what were we doing at the end of the game. We’d just sealed victory by Barkley finally landing a kick, and we then give the ball away – whatever happened to keeping it tight and running the clock down? The Glaws soft underbelly showed again and we gave the Welsh a bonus point that they might have deserved, but should never have had.
Disgraceful.
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