Bath Rugby were feeling the pressure when Gloucester Rugby were chipping away at their lead at The Rec in Gallagher PREM Round 3, according to the Cherry & Whites’ head coach George Skivington.
Bath led Gloucester 28-0, were pegged back to 28-17 but won Saturday 11th October’s Gallagher PREM derby 38-17 | Photo © Richard Briggs
The Blue, Black & White raced into a 28-0 lead with a four-try burst in the opening half-hour on Saturday 11th October, only for the visitors to hit back with three scores to cut the deficit to 28-17 going into the final quarter.
Two missed conversions by Gloucester’s Ross Byrne – one attempt hit the left post, the other hit the right post – ensured Bath remained at arm’s length.
However, the hosts needed a penalty from the irrepressible Finn Russell to keep their derby rivals in check before a 66th-minute try sealed a 38-17 Bath victory.
The Cherry & Whites have lost all three of their PREM games this season, and have banked only two points.
In his press conference after the Derby Weekend loss to the reigning champions, Skivington said: “The boys showed good character again.
“There was probably the opportunity to completely fold and get blown away and actually we managed to swing the momentum in the first 20 of the second half, and barring a little bit of inaccuracy we could’ve nicked another try and maybe got it a bit tighter and pushed Bath a bit harder for the last 15 minutes.
“I didn’t feel the boys weren’t at the races in the first half, I think Bath were just very good and we weren’t.
“Hitting the post twice… When Bath took their three points, I think it’s unusual for Bath in that position to take three points to sort of squeeze us out. So when they made that decision, I thought ‘Right, they’re feeling the pressure from us’.
“If the other two conversions had gone through and hadn’t hit the post, then maybe it’s even tighter and maybe we could’ve forced Bath to make a few more mistakes. But they were tough kicks from Ross and they were smart kicks from Bath when they took the three.”
Of Russell – who had a 100% record with the boot on the day, with six successful kicks – Skivington said: “Obviously he’s the best in the British Isles, if not the world. He’s impressive, isn’t he?
“He does everything really, really well. One of their tries, he just doesn’t have any right to step through, jink and offload and he does. So he’s a bit of a nightmare.”
Will Joseph’s try right on half-time gave Gloucester a foothold in the match when they had looked dead and buried.
Skivington said: “I thought he [Joseph] was great. Will’s one of the many signings we’ve made that we’re hoping we’ll get him back to his best and I think he’s slowly but surely showing it.
“I think that is an important moment because the boys were knocking on the door a few times. Make a mistake, suddenly Bath score and you could lose context of the game and go ‘We’re just getting pumped here’ but actually we weren’t.
“It was massive for us really just to get a score and be rewarded for being brave, playing hard, the breakdown work we’d done and just for the boys to go ‘We can score here, we can break them’ and they carried that through into the first 20 minutes of the second half. We just didn’t do enough to get enough scores.
“There’s a certain way you’ve got to play Bath in the second half because I think probably every team in the league comes in at half-time and tries to put a strategy [together].
“Everybody gets blown away in the second half, so that was a positive for us, we did have a second-half plan and I think it was 10-all in the second half.
“We probably did a role reversal of what most people do this week, where most first halves are pretty competitive here and [then] Bath blow you away. So there’s a couple of good bits.
“The reality of the fixtures – Sale away, Bath away – I wasn’t expecting us in truth to be in the greatest [position].
“I wanted us to nick a few points from the away games, win the home game [against Northampton Saints], and we’re probably five or six points short of where I’d like us to be right now, being realistic.
“It’s not an ideal start. It’s a bit gutting from all the prep we’ve put in but we’re just getting tested early on and we’ve ridden plenty of storms like this before.
“You won’t see us dropping our heads. We’ll keep doing what we do, keep trying to push through and hopefully we’ll get better.
“I thought we looked better in attack this week than we did last week [in losing to Northampton].
“Without a doubt, you can see there’s a lot of people who haven’t been running our system for a long time. There’s no getting away from that.
“It’s really hard to fast track that. But we actually played better out there today, particularly second half. The connections were better, we got through some phases. The breakdown work was actually very good, albeit they still stole a lot of balls – with the amount of poachers they’ve got, they would expect to.
“But I feel there’s a bit of rhythm coming. I think we’re slowly getting there.
“We’d rather be doing it quicker but I felt there were moments in the game Bath just took today and just scored and that was fair enough, but I think most of the game it was pretty competitive. The boys fought hard and I do feel we were better than we were last week.”
Skivington acknowledged that errors cost his side field position at The Rec.
He said: “I think the line-out towards the end of the game is a good reflection of that. We’ve got a maul going forward, Bath pull it down, we’re in the corner again.
“It’s not so much losing the line-out, because Bath do a good job of getting up in the air, that’s fine, but then their hooker [Kepueli Tuipulotu] manages to run 40 metres, get the ball, then suddenly they’re in behind.
“They’re very clinical and we end up on our own line and suddenly we’re camping there. We’ve got to cut that out. You make mistakes in rugby games, people get in the air and steal a line-out, but you’ve got to make them exit then and not allow him to run 40 metres.”
Gloucester gave a debut to former New Zealand international prop Nepo Laulala, the 33-year-old playing the first half.
Skivington said: “I was always going to bring him off [at half-time] because he’s not played for 18 months. He’s had a lot of turmoil in the background of moving round and contracts getting cut and all this sort of drama. So I thought he did really well.
“He actually overplayed, he played better than I thought he was going to, so I thought he did a really good job.”
