mens
Gallagher-Prime Minister
Gloucester Head coach George Skivington has praised the impact his big names have already made following their withdrawal Exeter Chiefs 45-24 at Sandy Park.
New captain and whore Dewi Lake scored two tries, while his Wales international team-mate Jac Morgan and South African Jean Kleyn also contributed greatly to the impressive bonus-point win.
Skivington said: “The result is great but what we’ve seen in the character, especially in some of those defensive sets from the boys, is a good snapshot of what we’ve been asking them to go for this year.
“Hopefully the guys we’ve brought in, combined with the quality we’ve known for many years, will give us that.
“I thought Dewi did well, Jac had a lot of good moments in the game in the little bits and Jean really showed his presence in the first half, but I thought we did well throughout the game.
“We’ve talked a lot about certain behaviors we want to see and things we’re going after, but you can only talk about it so much and you have to see it on the field.”
Skivington was also full of praise for the work new defensive coach Joel Tomkins has done with the team.
He added: “Exeter had us under a lot of pressure at stages, especially in the second half, and then we go down to 14 men, and there are a lot of saves to be made, but the way the boys bounced back, we have to give Joel a lot of credit for coming in and getting it.
“They hit hard and the work rate off the ball was great. It’s only the first round but is it a good snapshot of what we’ve done and we hope to keep it going.”
Exeter director of rugby Rob Baxter refused to blame the defeat on the illness-ravaged build-up to the game which saw a player dropped from the expected 23 almost every day in the week leading up to the match.
He said: “If it had been a real battle and we had tried really hard with most of the things we said we were going to do and Gloucester had come out on top then I would have said ‘fair play we did pretty well for the problems we had’ but I think we were a good degree below that and I thought we were pretty bad.
“We didn’t have a lot of ambition in the wind, we kicked weakly and at times when we didn’t need to, we didn’t even look at the counter and Dave Walder (attacking coach) has worked really hard on that in the last few weeks.
“In the end we just slowly gave Gloucester more and more chances and they were good, they were clinical, they looked powerful at times and we lacked a bit of composure and direction to attack the game.”
