Round 8 of the Gallagher Premiership sees Gloucester Rugby travel to the Brentford Community Stadium to face Cherry & Whites Director of Rugby George Skivington’s former club London Irish.
Gloucester currently sit bottom of the table having only won one game all season, meanwhile London Irish will be looking to build on their round seven win over Newcastle Falcons, four places in the table separate both sides and 10 points.
It is no secret that George Skivington is not getting the results he would like, there’s been plenty of missed opportunities in close games this year, even more so in their last game at Kingsholm,
“We’ve certainly gone down the honest conversations route. We did some good stuff and we put ourselves into a position to go on and win the game and as I said after the game, there was some clocking off and we’ve looked at that and that’s something for our younger and less experienced players have to understand. This is an 80-minute game and in the Premiership if you clock off it can cost you 7 points which it did for us a couple of times at the weekend.
“Is it fun going through the pain? No. But it is the reality of it so that’s where we’re at. Hopefully the tide will turn, and we will get some results.”
With Skivington seemingly blaming younger players for lack of experience, maybe losing games like that is the best way to blood these youngsters, you learn more about yourself after a loss, but results really do need to start coming soon for Skivington, particularly if he wants to keep his job.
“You do enough analysis on every team that you understand how they are going to play. Breaking it down and stopping it is a completely different side to it. Where we are right now in terms of growth as a team, we need to focus on ourselves more than anything.”
Focusing on themselves is the message, looking towards this game Skivington seems optimistic that a win will do his youngsters a world of good, and backing them is the best option instead of chopping and changing his team, he doesn’t really have a choice to do that with the opening weekend of the Six Nations coming.
It looks like Gloucester will be without several key players, Jake Polledri, Stephen Varney, Chris Harris, Louis Rees-Zammit and Jonny May all look like they’ll be playing for their respective nations this weekend.
Even with these players missing, Gloucester still have a good core to their squad available, can Gloucester kick on and get some wins during the international calendar?
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