By Cherry Picker
October 16 2010
Italian side Rovigo had every right to feel embarrassed over their performance in the 90-7 Euro defeat against Gloucester ... in fact, it was so bad that many in the Kingsholm crowd, and perhaps even some in the Glaws team, felt embarrassed for them. If ever there was a mismatch in European rugby, this was it.
Glaws scored 14 tries in what was never much more than a training game and the biggest mistake they could make would be to assume that a win of this size means they’ve cracked it.
They haven’t – all they’ve done is hammer a woefully weak team which could muster little in the way of bottle to make up for their obvious shortage of class.
Teams from a lot further down England’s rugby ladder could have won almost as easily.
But don’t be hard on Glaws – it wasn’t their fault the opposition fell short of the required standard, and at least they played as professionals by refusing to ease off the gas when it was clear they had more than enough to win.
Jonny May topped the scoring charts with a hat trick of tries, while James Simpson-Daniel and Lesley Vainikolo both scored two, the others coming from Andy Hazell, Freddie Burns, Olly Morgan, Henry Morgan, Charlie Sharples and a penalty.
Burns converted nine and Nicky Robinson one, while German Bustos scored the consolation and converted it, Rovigo getting a round of applause out of sympathy more than anything else.
The pity about the game is that it didn’t provide much of a test for a much-changed Glaws team and therefore provided little new insight to the real strength in depth at Kingsholm.
The same will NOT be true over the next two weekends, with Harlequins and Leicester the visitors in Premiership games which will be more competitive BEFORE the kick-off than this Euro disappointment was after it.
In fact, many a game of happy families is contested more fiercely than this one was.