Newcastle Falcons won their second game of the season in an upset against Gloucester at the Kingsholm Stadium.
This was a third home defeat for George Skivington’s side this season.
A disappointing first half for the home side left them 17 points down at half time, a deficit that was too great to overcome despite a late comeback.
The Cherry and White’s starting line-up was not what we’re used to seeing as a result of all international players being away with their respective countries, however this gave a number of players an opportunity to get some playing time under their belt including some academy graduates.
One of the players that will be happy with what they showed during their opportunity to start is winger Tom Seabrook, who scored in the 38th minute to ensure that Gloucester went in at half time with some points on the board.
Seabrook made his debut in 2018, breaking the record for fastest Premiership try in 58 seconds, but would normally miss out on starting spots to players such as Louis Rees Zammit, Jonny May and Santiago Carreras. Despite the result, he will be happy to have made an impact in his second Premiership match of the season.
Speaking after the game, Gloucester Head Coach George Skivington said about the changes made to the back line “I don’t think it’s difficult to prepare, I think you’d expect it to be a bit clunky but they’ve had two weeks together now.”
“I’ve got probably 20 different things in my mind where we could’ve capitalised in the end and we took the wrong options. So us coaches have got to take accountability for what we’re doing and why were not making good decisions and why we’re not accurate, but I won’t take anything away from Newcastle, I thought they were very good today.”
Gloucester lost their previous game to Sale Sharks at the AJ Bell Stadium. They also conceded 24 points in the first half of that game. The head coach said that he would ‘love to know’ because as a team they “talked about it all last week and did it again”
Skivington’s team were able to completely alter their performance later in the second half. The turnaround of their amateur like handling mistakes in the first half and Newcastle’s poor discipline in the second half was exactly what Gloucester needed to get back into the game. They began to capitalise on the advantage of an extra player when the away side had yellow cards and picked up most of their points during that time.
Talking about what was said to his side at half time, Skivington said “We stick to the same sort of message, we wanted to stick with our plan we just hadn’t executed in the first half.”
“I think it was three times we broke through in the first half and three times Newcastle stole our breakdown. We talked breakdown before and we talked breakdown at half time.”
“Second half was better, it was a huge amount of pressure but we’ve got to convert some of this pressure into points.”
“So ultimately we didn’t prepare them well enough. It probably proved harder than I expected at the beginning of the game.”
Gloucester play Harlequins at Twickenham in their next Premiership match on November 25th, hoping to put on a better performance after back to back losses.
