By Giles the Drunk
November 16 2005

Next up it’s Gloucester at the Madstad, a fixture that poses one simple question : do you assess things on recent form or on past results between these two teams?

If you go on past results then this game is somewhat of a foregone conclusion : it’ll be a low’ish’ scoring game dominated by Gloucester scoring one or two tries and Barry trying to keep up with penalties with more often than not Irish losing……and not by much (most of the time)!

Irish have only won 3 out of the last 10 meetings in the league, encouragingly all of those coming at home.

If form is your barometer however, then this looks a much tougher game to call. Things certainly are a’changin in the world of Irish. We seem to be swapping Boots for Flutes lately.

I doubt even the most hardy ‘half-fullers’ amongst us would’ve predicted we would be in 5th place and only 1 point behind our opponents going into this game but that is the reality of the present day.

Not only that but we’ve outscored them by 16 tries to 14 at this stage.

Gloucester are without Tindall and Vickery, individuals that any team would miss but we have performed well without 2 of our stars, Mr Magne and Leguizamon.

If I may quote a fellow poster on Shed Web who said : “A CRUCIAL game if we want to keep ourselves in the top 4 of the table, the Irish are only 1 point behind us in the table and are showing some dangerous signs of a team on form”

With a few days still to go my gut feel says a 6 point win to Irish, based mainly on what I’ve seen in the last couple of games but could it actually be that we go into a game as favourites…………Nah what do I know? .