An Eds Diary - 17th November 2003

By BrianC
August 11 2004

In the cup we beat Gloucester at Kingsholm. It is ten years since we last managed this. England make it through to the final of the Rugby World Cup where they will play Australia.

An Ed’s Diary – 17th November 2003

Gloucester 29 – 36 London Irish, our first win at Kingsholm in ten years. Above all it was a wonderful all round performance, many of those on the messageboard are saying it is the best performance this season. Certainly I feel that it is the best one we have put in since the Powergen Cup Final in 2002. It was yet another nerve wracking game. Going into injury time we were nine points up and appeared to be coasting. Bish was binned for offside, Glaws then scored a penalty and proceeded to camp inside our twenty two for what turned out to be ten minutes of injury time.

Our defence held firm, the mean green wall, and the game was ours. When I was asking for MOTM nominations quite a few people were mentioning Paul Hull. Certainly the forwards have been a revelation this season. Whereas last one they seemed to have the single tactic of battering their way through the middle, this year they are showing much greater variety. The route up the middle is still being used but this is mixed with much better use of the width of the field. We are again scoring tries, four yesterday including two blistering ones from O’Sackey. As I write the prospects for the rest of the season look good indeed.

The Strudwick tackle that laid out Andy Goode in the Sarries game was shown on The Rugby Club during the week. General consensus across both our and the Sarries sites is that it was a penalty, it may have deserved a yellow card but no more than that. Certainly nobody now seems to be saying that there was any malicious intent. Ryan hasn’t been cited so the matter is now closed. The hearing on Sale player Chris Jones for his tackle on O’Sheasby has been delayed for a week.

In the RWC my feeling that England had better performances to come proved correct. In a rain sodden Sydney they beat France 24 – 7. It was by no means a pretty game, the conditions ensured that. All England’s points came from the boot of Jonny Wilkinson who scored three drop goals on top of the penalties England were awarded. The French fly half, Michalak, had a nightmare of a game. He missed four penalties including two in the first half which appeared quite straightforward. Had he made those the score would have been 13 – 3 to France on thirty minutes, it could then have been a very different game. That said England never looked like losing. Next week they meet Australia in the final. The Aussies pulled off the surprise of the semis beating New Zealand 22 – 10. My money is on England for that game, they strike me as being too streetwise to let Australia get the better of them.

The site has been very busy since our win over Sarries. At the mid point in November we were on 122k hits. If we keep going at the rate of the last week our record of 262k set last May will be toppled. Yesterday was the busiest Sunday I can recall, 6.5k hits where it is normally around 3k. There is nothing like a string of good results to get people talking.

Four of our next five ZP games are at home. In the next two weeks we are playing Newcastle and Sale. After our home and away European games against Montauban we are away at Rotherham. As Reading Fatboy has pointed out on the board have the ability to win all these games, certainly we will be favourites. Looking ahead the real crunch will be our games against Saints and Wasps either side of new year. They will be back to full strength, we will then see what a difference that makes. Should we win those a finish in the top three is distinctly possible.