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Ah well. That said, I still feel more confident than if they’d enforced the follow on and spanked us in 3 days.

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.