By Jaynebeth
July 4 2002

One of the most sucessfull seasons for Gloucester Rugby Club in recent years. 3rd place in the Zurich Premiership, a Heineken Cup place and officially Champions of England. In this review Janebeth tells us how she viewed the season as a whole for Gloucester. My Review of the Season

There are many pages floating around on the web full of statistics, who won what, where and when, equally there are pages devoted to who didn’t win, why they didn’t and by how many points they failed. No statistics tell the human story, the emotions, the tears or the joy. In my review of the season I’m not going to play the statistic card, but draw more on all that I personally saw or heard.

Throughout the season just gone, we experienced every high, low and in-between. There was righteous indignation in our support of Ollie, pride in our defence of our good name, sadness at Phillipe’s departure, elation at Twickenham, cautious optimism with the arrival of new coaching staff and sweet harmony in the rendition of ‘Are You Watching Rob Andrew’.

Every one of us can pick a moment throughout the season where we held our breath and prayed. I was sat directly behind the posts at Franklin Gardens when Ludo readied himself to kick to win; it wasn’t meant to be - we went home with only the satisfaction of seeing Sharky kicked out. Quite rightly we saluted Ludo for having a go; the game was lost by much more than that one kick. Then how about the Bristol game in April where the lead bounced backwards and forwards, finishing the only way a Cherry & White supporter believed it could finish. The stuff that heart attacks are made of.

And depression, Good God, there was those awful couple of weeks where we questioned our sanity, our commitment and our counting skills. Could Gloucester really have shipped over 100 points in 4 days? Dark days at Wasps and Northampton, leaving us looking like also-rans, facing the humiliation and scorn that would certainly flow to the message boards.

The biggest surprise of the year? Stuart Barnes waxing lyrical over Gloucester players. He is a potential convert; the Sky Rugby Club pundits were regularly backing us to win, they praised the players and the Shed, - will we see him next year in a replica shirt?

"There are not fifty ways of fighting, there’s only one, and that’s to win", I think Andre Malraux said that, I don’t think he had Gloucester in mind at the time and I’m fairly sure that it doesn’t come up in training sessions; but the end of the season was awesome, and we surely won. The Bath game, brilliant; the Leeds game, fantastic; the Newcastle game, I don’t have enough superlatives to cover the subject; the Sale game, good enough….Twickenham, la, la la!

All Gloucester website surfers, no matter where there loyalties lie - Rivals, KC, Official Club Site, Sports Network - know the outcome, we were just robbed of second in the league, we won at Twikkahs, and there was a big party at Kingsholm to celebrate.

The highest point had to be the team lapping Twickenham paying homage to the loyal 20,000 plus, who in turn gave them a standing ovation. The lowest point was Phillipe saying goodbye, the sight of him overcome with emotion was caught by a multitude of cameras, somehow captions weren’t necessary.

Other winners – Sky Rugby Club regularly featured Gloucester stars in ‘Player of the Month’ and ‘Try of the Month’, and they always won, by huge margins, in fact there were three of our tries in ‘Try of the Season’, the hardest choice was which to pick! And the pundits insinuated that we manipulated the voting system, or that everyone living in Gloucester voted.

International honours were originally planned for a chosen few, end-of-season form propelled this to a good proportion of the team winging its way to Argentina for England, and other corners of the globe for others.

So what’s my summary? – we’ve got a big shiny cup, we qualified for the Heineken Cup, success is certainly sweet, there are no certainties when it comes to relegation and the Shed rocks!