Now Glaws need bouncebackability

If a team is going to win things in any sport, it needs one quality as much as all the others … bouncebackability. It’s a word first coined by former footy manager Iain Dowie, but it applies to rugby just as much as it does to soccer, and it’s a quality Gloucester need to display when they play Saracens in the Premiership at the weekend.

Last weekend’s defeat at Newcastle was a major blow to the team’s ambitions, even though coach Bryan Redpath tried to play down the importance of the defeat by saying it wasn’t the end of the world.
Indeed it wasn’t, but it was hardly good news, either, and it means the Saracens game takes on an even greater importance than it already had.
Glaws have top-four ambitions, and teams with such lofty aims need to win at places like Newcastle, who have struggled all season and are very unlikely to pose too many problems to the best Premiership teams this season.
Whether they blame bad refereeing decisions, bad luck or bad play, the Newcastle defeat won’t have done the Glaws team spirit a lot of good, and that’s why they need to produce the goods against Sarries at Kingsholm on Saturday evening.
That game is followed by a December 3 trip to sale Sharks, and good returns from both these games are vital if Glaws are to go into the following cup break in a healthy premiership position.
They are still fourth top, four points behind third-top Sarries and only a point ahead of Leicester and Wasps, who are both breathing heavily down their necks.
Beating Saracens 36-10 in the LV= Cup means only that the visitors will be more desperate than usual for a result. It certainly doesn’t man that Glaws go into the game with an advantage.
Prop Nick Wood is hopefully speaking for all the players when he tells the Citizen: "We're definitely a top-four team. Sunday's defeat doesn't change that, it just makes us more determined to continue to prove our top-four credentials in the coming weeks.
"Now we've got two massive games where we can still cement our place in the playoff places, and that's what we intend to do."
Hopefully he will be proved right not only on Saturday night, but also at Sale the following Friday.