Poor Ref today

[Cardiff Tig]

Back again !

- Harrison really does serve up some rubbish. Anyone who thinks he had a good game must please visit SpecSavers immediately. Some good stretching however for Toby Flood, who had to take several passes off his toes (taken very well I might add) and quite a few from about 10 foot in the air (again, well taken). Like I said, Ben Youngs is a very dangerous player, he attracts defenders so Flood can play as flat as a pancake and has more time to look at options. Without that (like he had yesterday), he gets too easily flustered, kicks ball away and although makes the odd break, isn't even half the player. So what do you do when you've a scrum inside the opposition 22m area, when you can see that the tide is turning and that Gloucester are getting the 'nudge' ? What you do is, you get the ball in and OUT as quickly as possible. What you don't do is leave the 8 to control it and then ultimately lose it ! That passage of play was unbelievable and right in front of where I was sat, I pulled out several clumps of hair, much to the amusement of the Glaws faithful sat in and around me.

- I'm a coach, so ask me about what Gloucester's strengths are - I don't care, I'm going to tell you anyway !! ...Gloucester are a solid unit, reasonable in the forwards, hard-working with decent half-backs but they come to life if you give them open-field situations. So that would be kicking the ball aimlessly into the Gloucester half and inviting them to counter-attack. I mean, it's not like Sinbad and Sharples need a second chance do they. So second half, things are ticking along and we're edging our way back into the game and there's a sequence of play where we kick to them, they kick to us....then Geordan Murphy goes down clutching his knee....the trainer comes on - ALERT ALERT !! full back is out of the equation !!! ALERT ALERT ! So the sensible thing to do would be to (Scotty Hamilton), to hoof the ball into Row Z of the C&G or whatever it's called now stand and then take stock and re-align. But no no no .....let's kick it down their most dangerous player's throat...there you go Sinbad, have a run...oh you did.....oh, we're out of position, oh they've scored...oh, there goes the game !! Now that ladies and gentlemen is nowt to do with Cockers, he wasn't on the park you see...that is an All Black, Canterbury Crusader...Super 14 winner...English Premiership winner....making the wrong decision !

So aside from the reluctance of JP Doyle to get the yellow card out, the "could have been" penalty try for the slam dunk by Cook, we didn't really help ourselves did we ? I hate losing to Gloucester more than any other team...I live here, I work here, I have to put up with this until at last 28th December when we hopefully have worked out how to be better...until then, I get a load of flack ! I'm a big bloke, I can take it but I don't like it when we lose in the manner that we did. Cockers says that there was lots of commitment and passion - I say we were headless chickens in places, we were (very) naive in other places, we were even clueless in some places.

So to summarise going into the Autumn Internationals, it might be a blessing in disguise, all of our out-of-form players will go and join their countries, our "second string" will come in and hopefully we will see a reaction.

Good post. I would really like to see Flood actually sit a bit deeper for a period of the game and actually kick the ball into space/turn the defence. When he spends most of the game picking up bad passes and then being closed down straight away then he needs to realise that standing as flat as he does all the time is actually not helping the situation. When the scrum half is keeping the back row at least partly honest then Flood playing flat is as good as anyone. When Harrison plays he tends to get steam rolled by the defence charging up as they know the half is about as threatening as a 90 year old.