LACK OF FINISHING COST GLOS DEAR
This was desperate stuff against a poor Worcester team, and players and coaches alike should hang their heads in shame – I can’t see any obvious excuses for the lack of performance.
Let’s start with the team selections: Dean Ryan stuck two fingers up to Haze by preferring Qera to him – our DoR needs to start recognising the value of a specialist 7 or it might just end up costing him his job. As a decision, it was dim, dim, dim. It’s hard to put into words just how bad the back row of Satala, Qera and Narraway was – their primary function seemed to be to get in the way of our attacks.
Next to the centres where, despite what some say, Anthony Allen is a shadow of the player he was. Where is the centre who was a handful and made ground pretty well every time, spinning out of tackles and earning an England place? Whether it’s the legacy of injury, or being asked to fulfil a role that’s alien to him, he’s not in any sort of acceptable form and needs to be relegated to the bench until he comes back to himself. Watkins is an adequate centre, but no more than that and genuine Premiership contenders need better than that. Worcester focused their attacks down the centre and we weren’t up to the job.
Rory Lawson has his fans, and he has had a couple of decent games of late, but he also has had some stinkers and Sunday was one of them. Slow pass, lots of aimless arm-waving, and damn all creativity – not what we need from a 9.
Despite all of that, we had more than enough chances to come away with a bonus point win! In the first half Wood and Somerville had the Wuss props thoroughly sorted with their scrum going backwards at a rate of knots, but despite that we couldn’t make anything of the opportunities we had. Our line out functioned OK too – we made no impression on theirs but we were solid enough on our own ball. A word about Olly: I’m a huge fan of his, but the loony penalty he gave away with five minutes to go took our final chance of victory with it – it was so obviously from the side, and born out of frustration that it was just plain daft.
King Carlos tried his best but he had his worst game for us since his arrival: the number of times Balshaw was screaming for a cross-field kick, only for the ball to be sent the other way, had to be seen to be believed. The 10’s pass was as good as ever but his decision making was way off key. As we all know, but DR seemingly has missed, Spencer isn’t a front-line Premiership kicker, and we mustn’t EVER start a game again without one. If we’d had Barkley at 12 from the start I think we would have won – he couldn’t have offered less creativity than the centres we played.
Wuss were strictly limited in what they offered: the pick and drive dominated the second-half and, as usual, we were bereft of ideas about how to counter it. However, well done to them as they wanted the result and they went about it in an organised way – you can see why they’re second from bottom and it’s shame on us that we couldn’t put them away.
Despite today I still retain some optimism for the remainder of the season, as long as injuries don’t ruin it. Add in Tindall, Sinbad, Delve, Strokosch, Cooper for Lawson, and play Haze at 7, and we’ve still got a hell of a team. My worry is DR’s continued brainstorms but I can fix that for him. I hereby volunteer mine and other Shedweb contributors’ expertise in picking the team for forthcoming games – it really isn’t as hard as DR is making it out to be, and we can still beat any team on our day if we pick the right XV! |
