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Gloucester‘s performance in the Heineken Cup has not been good over the last few years.  In fact, the years that we’ve got in, we’ve always done badly.  After (just) topping the Premier League this year (let’s forget the final, shall we?) we’ve finally got pretty much the best we could have hoped for out of the draw for next year’s competition.

I know, I know. We lost. And it wasn’t even close.

Glaws looked pretty much the best we have all season. Twickenham here we come. Leicester in the final, which should make for an interesting match.

Some quotes from the BBC commentary:

The Gloucester loose-forwards swarm all over a discordant Saracens pack

The game is opening right up as Gloucester indulge in a bit of showboating and Saracens try desperately to salvage some pride.

Gloucester are rampant…

Marvellous. A right royal thrashing.

This is the second time since the creation of Premiership Rugby ™ that Gloucester have finished the regular season at the top of the table. Last time (the first year of the competition) we got spanked by Wasps in the final. This time there’s a real chance we could actually claim the title as well as the moral victory.

It’s been a phenomenal season that really lived up to the promise that we showed last year – how much that’s been helped by an early exit from Europe and a very heavy Six Nations schedule I can’t comment. Regardless here’s hoping that we cement the success in the final two matches.

Glaws take their rightful position at the top of the table. And it was a fairy tale game for Jake Boer in his last appearance at Kingsholm (and wearing the armband too).

…from your side’s players playing for England. If there was a chance that England’s 6 nations campaign was anything other than doomed I wouldn’t begrudge them our star players, but knackering Olly Morgan for the rest of the season in the midst of this disastrous English campaign makes me feel pretty pissed off, to be honest. They’ll have Tindall and Richards on the injured list by the end of this tournament knowing Glaws’s luck. Arsecheeks.

It was a real shame the highly trailed top-of-the-table local-derby Friday-night-televised-extravaganza that was Bristol vs Glos ended up being played in such atrocious conditions. That said, sometimes rugby is simply about who drops the ball the least and Glos couldn’t hold on to the slippery ball the way Bristol did. The better team on the night won, but it was disappointing to break our unbeaten streak in that manner. (And losing so many players to Andy Robinson’s fiasco of an England side didn’t help.)

What is also shown up by the result is the power of the bonus point. Wasps have got 7 bonus points from 9 matches, while Glos have only got 1. That’s essentially a win and a draw for free. We’re going to need to stop consistently scoring 3 tries and get that fourth one over the line every now and again or our place in the top few of the table will be seriously challenged, despite our record.

So – Glos have maintained their unbeaten record in the Premiership, and against the old enemy at that (perhaps the one match that secretly we all worried we would lose). Glos 27 Wasps 21. What’s particularly heartening is Dean Ryan’s comments about Anthony Allen:

…the conversations we had with England were that if they were going to pick him they had to stick with him and they haven’t…

The appalling performance of England over these last few weeks wasn’t made any better by today’s extremely scrappy and very fortunate win over South Africa. Robinson has to go, and the Gloucester boys (Richards, Forrester, Hazel, Allen, Vickery, Balshaw and so on) have made a very good fist of being stuck in a messed up dressing room that Rob Andrew has to sort ASAFP. Anthony Allen shouldn’t worry about being dropped – there’s a change a-coming, and it’s not going to kill his career, but it should stop a few others.