Bad Loss to Gloucester

Playing next week...
By Graeme D
January 13 2006

Well, where do I start? I’ve never written an obituary before. Back in June this year we met Gloucester at Twickenham for the final Heineken place. On that day we won convincingly. I always thought we would. Today we had similar opposition, a similar team playing for us, but we lost convincingly.

What is the difference between now and then – lack of confidence – lack of leadership – lack of a desire to win – lack of discipline - lack of commitment?

We need leadership both on and off the pitch, we need a captain who is worth his place in the side and puts his body on the line and motivates his men – he should spend his time lifting his own players rather than arguing with the ref – Hugh you are no Martin Johnson, stop trying to be him.

Dimes – before the match you said you had a game plan – can you please let the supporters and more importantly the players know, what it is then! (I do not believe it is stick it up your jumper for 70 mins and hope to score in the last 10 mins when we seem to start playing.)

For those of you who weren’t there and haven’t seen the match on sky we were bad and when I say bad, I mean bad – I have only ever walked out of one Rugby Match before the end – it would have been two today but I though I’d better stay just in case something did happen in the last 20 mins.

Any way I had better say something about the match just to prove I was there. Not a bad start – 3 mins on the clock and a cracking kick by Glenda to the corner - 5 metre lineout – throw comes in - first penalty to Gloucester for interfering (why do we do it ? we weren’t even competing).

For the next 20 minutes nothing happened except 31 men ran around a rugby pitch kicked the ball high in to the air, occasionally off the field, and then for the first time a genius called Thomas Castigniade picked up the ball running back under his own posts being chased by the speedy Simpson- Daniel. TC not only out paced him but then gave a superb reverse pass to Glenda splitting their backs in two. Glenda Kicked downfield – crowd going mad – TC follows up the kick – Tackles their fullback – we win turnover ball – Crowd getting even more excited – ball back to Dickens – kicks stupid little box kick to Richards who marks. End of Sarries attack for the rest of the half. Sarries crowd falls asleep again.

For the rest of the half we defended and defended well, that is until the dying moments of the half when we conceded a strange penalty for holding on ? when I though the ref was playing advantage to us for a knock on. Vickery opted for the line out in the corner and Richards scored of the back of the rolling maul.

Second half – more of the same – lots of tackling from Sarries – about the only positive from the game – and a ping pong match of kicking and penalties between the two fly halfs. I can’t actually remember us getting into their 22 for the whole of the second half despite a few attempts at running the ball towards the end including a super dummy pass from Glenda to Taine (It was that good I think Taine even thought he had the ball). However in the end the way the game ended summed up the match – Glaws one man short (Vickery in the bin) – but still controlling a driving maul towards the Sarries line.

Best player in the Gloucester forwards was Balding and in the backs Richards looked good – could well be starting for England in 6N – Ludo – controlled the game well at Fly Half and the young Full back Olly Morgan – always looked safe under the high ball and looked dangerous in attack.

Quiz for the interested – what minute was the first scrum awarded ?

SCORERS: Saracens: Penalty goals: Jackson 3 (44min, 49, 61). Gloucester: Try: Richards (40+5). Conversion: Mercier. Penalty goals: Mercier 4 (42, 47, 57, 64).

SCORING SEQUENCE (Saracens first): 0-7 (half-time), 0-10, 3-10, 3-13, 6-13, 6-16, 9-16, 9-19.

SARACENS: D Scarbrough; B Johnston, T Castaignède, K Sorrell, T Vaikona; G Jackson, A Dickens (rep: M Rauluni, 54); K Yates, M Cairns (rep: S Byrne, 54), H Mitchell (rep: B Broster, 72), S Raiwalui (rep: B Skirving, 34), K Chesney (sin-bin, 36-42), T Randell, B T Russell (rep: D Seymour, 54), H Vyvyan.

GLOUCESTER: O Morgan; M Foster, J Simpson-Daniel (rep: B Davies, 80+1), M Tindall, J Bailey (rep: T Fanolua, 62); L Mercier, P Richards; P Collazo (rep: T Sigley, 62), M Davies, P Vickery (sin-bin, 74), A Eustace, A Brown, P Buxton, J Boer (rep: P Collazo, 79), A Balding (rep: J Merriman, 67-72).

Referee: A Spreadbury.

Attendance: 6,493.

Marks out of 10 for our players
Yates 5 Nothing good nothing bad
Cairns 3 Barn door two yards ?
Mitchell 6 Good effort for first start, tired towards the end
Simon 4 First time I noticed him was when he was coming off
Kris 4 Silly sin binning
Taine 5 Waiting for retirement
Ben Russell 7 Good effort – why did Dimes take him off ?
Hugh 5 As a player
Hugh 2 As captain (and that’s only because he looks after the mascots well)
Dickens 4 Out of his league against Richards
Jacko 6 Good place kicker, couple of nice breaks.
TV 4 Not the man he was last year
Kev 7 As with Sprout showed commitment
TC 6 Brilliant when he got the ball
BJ 5 Was he a winger or a fly half today?
Scabs 6 Lots of spirit and a couple of breaks

Replacements
Shayne 4 Barn door three yards
Ben Bros 5 Couldn’t stop Glaws upfront
Ben Skirv 6 Some good driving runs and tackles
Moses 6 Added a little Zip to our backs