Given that I was expecting a tonking, you’d think I would be quite pleased with that result.
And yet, I came away from it with a deep sense of disappointment, of an opportunity lost.
Like last week against Exeter, we got off to a good start: fourteen-nil up after twenty minutes, and all the action in the Glasgow half. Then, with ten minutes to go to half-time, we seemed to go to sleep again. Two tries brought them to two points adrift, and we were going into the break feeling a bit shell-shocked.
And that continued after the break.
No sooner had we in the stands finished agreeing amongst ourselves that they needed to just calm things down a bit, consolidate and regain the initiative, than Glasgow scored again to take a five-point lead.
When Glasgow scored their fourth fifteen minutes into the half, we had shipped twenty-six unanswered points in just over half an hour of play and were looking utterly bemused at what had happened.
We managed to rally sufficiently to score a third try ten minutes later, bringing us into losing bonus point territory, and even had a chance to nick it at the end, but – shock! – buggered up the lineout.
I could go on about the list of first-team regulars missing from the team: Bev, Dickie, Asher, DDP, Fordy, Buck, Carps…
And, in fact, I will, because that is some serious firepower we were lacking against a team fielding ten (I believe) Scottish internationals. To get within five points – indeed, to be within a gnat’s todger of winning it – says a lot about the fight in the lads.
But we can’t ignore that period of Glasgow dominance…
The initiative in a game will ebb and flow from one team to the other; that’s inevitable. It’s how you deal with those periods when you’re under the cosh that goes a long way to determining the result.
Unfortunately, we seem to start losing our heads a bit when (as here), the opposition stage a moderately rapid comeback. I think the twelve points in ten minutes before half-time set the stage for the early part of the second half. A bit of panic set in, causing us to lose a bit of cohesion in defence and trying to force things in attack (at least, that’s how it looked from my vantage point).
We did eventually get it back together, but by then, it was too late, as they’d scored two more tries.
I’ve mentioned before the Law of Lineouts: the probability of buggering up a line out is inversely proportional to its distance from a try line. That probability also increases with the potential reward from a successful lineout.
So, a five-metre attacking lineout, a minute or so from time, with the potential to nick the game, must be pretty much a dead cert to go wrong.
There won’t be a report from Clermont: I’m not going, unfortunately (I had a great time when I went before), and I don’t have a Premier Sports subscription, so I’ll be reliant on second-hand reporting and inadequate highlights packages.
Clermont apparently have a load of injured first-choice starters returning to the ranks, while we might have added Rikki to that too-long walking wounded list.
O, joy…
an old grey dog 