Following a 36-36 draw between Gloucester and Bordeaux-Bègles in the opening match of the Investec Champions Cup at Kingsholm, here are our five takeaways from a night that produced 10 tries and settled nothing.
The top line
Ten tries, five apiece, the lead changing hands four times and a scrum 30 seconds past the 80 minutes still deciding it. Bordeaux-Bègles came for a record 17th straight Investec Champions Cup win and leave with the run intact at 16, level with La Rochelle; Gloucester came for the scalp of the double champions, led 24-17 at the break and 36-29 with 20 to play, and leave with two points and a lesson in finishing. In front of 12,102, both sides will feel they let it go.
Martin Page-Relo sniped down an unguarded blind side off a maul in the fourth minute, Arthur Clark answered at nine, Max Llewellyn finished a 40-metre Jack Clement break from a wrecked UBB scrum at 14, and Sipili Falatea scored at 19 after Tom Willis had driven six metres with half the home pack hanging off him. Maxime Lucu kicked a penalty from 54 metres that nearly cleared the stand, George Barton ran a simple miss-move off Charlie Atkinson at 33 and added a penalty with the last kick of the half.
Pablo Uberti and Louis Bielle-Biarrey put UBB 29-24 up inside 10 minutes of the restart; Will Trenholm scored twice in four minutes off UBB’s refusal to clear their own 22; Bielle-Biarrey’s second levelled it at 63; and the last quarter was eight minutes of kick-return mayhem in which both sides broke the line and neither scored.
Under the new bonus system a side needs three more tries than the opposition, so five apiece earned nobody a fifth point, and in a pool where only three go through automatically a draw with the champions is a decent night for Gloucester. It’s also another French side failing to win on plastic, after Toulouse lost at Scotstoun in December and at the StoneX in January, where a certain Tom Willis scored for Saracens.
A hybrid too far
Ben Tameifuna at lock was the pre-match talking point and the game answered it both ways. Off the clubs’ listed weights UBB were around 35kg the heavier pack, nearly all of it Tameifuna, and in the maul he was immense; UBB absorbed three Gloucester lineout drives in the first half without competing in the air, and the moment he left at 57 the Gloucester maul started going forward. But a tighthead’s weight is no use to the tighthead in front of him unless the man at lock sits and drives like a lock, and Tameifuna doesn’t. Dian Bleuler took Falatea apart on the tighthead side in the 14th minute and the Llewellyn try came straight off it; the set-piece collapsed again on the first scrum of the second half, and the scrum success finished 100 per cent to 67. By the time Lasha Pkhakadze arrived to meet Val Rapava-Ruskin in a Georgian wrestle around the hour, the damage was done.
The second hybrid mattered more. With Matthieu Jalibert injured, Lucu captained from 10 with Page-Relo at nine and a six-two bench with no half-back on it. For an hour it scanned; the long pass that put Bielle-Biarrey into the line at 13 for Uberti’s try was a 10’s pass, and the kicking numbers are remarkable, Lucu alone kicking eighteen times for 803 metres, three-quarters of what the entire Gloucester side managed between Dan Robson, Barton and Charlie Atkinson, which is why a side with 44 per cent of the ball had 61 per cent of the territory after the break.
Where a nine at 10 doesn’t scan is game management. Held up on their own ball at 60, UBB turned it over 39 metres out and then seemed to be trying not to leave their own half at all; both Trenholm tries came off that refusal to exit, and when Page-Relo went at 70 and Bielle-Biarrey moved to 10, Romain Buros tried to run one out of the 22 and dropped it. Having spent so long getting into the country, UBB were strangely reluctant to leave their own 22.
Six entries, five tries
At 55 minutes Gloucester had made 11 entries into the UBB 22 for four tries and UBB had made six for five. UBB set eight rucks in the first 27 minutes and took 17 points from them; the full-time count was 63 rucks to 82, 206 carry metres to 417, 130 tackles to 101. Gloucester had the volume, the tempo and the scrum, UBB had the efficiency and, for most of the night, the scoreboard.
Gloucester went to the corner five times and got one try, Clark’s. Three consecutive corners between 27 and 32 minutes produced a held-up drive, a tap, a maul that went nowhere and a knock-on, with Dewi Lake lecturing Gianluca Gnecchi in between. UBB went to the corner four times and scored four tries. Robson’s tempo, Clement’s carrying and Ben Loader on the left put UBB under real pressure, but Seb Atkinson’s pass went to ground with a four-on-two on, and UBB’s midfield defence was superb. Yoram Moefana spilled a poor pass at 17, Loader was away, and Moefana got back to make the tackle that saved the try his own error had created. Marko Gazzotti turned ball over twice, Cameron Woki stole a throw, and the one midfield ruck UBB set in the Gloucester half before the interval was turned over by Jac Morgan, which is as good a reason as any for not setting many.
The electric scooter
On Thursday afternoon Bielle-Biarrey, Romain Gardrat, Matis Perchaud and Toma Taufa were stopped by Border Force at Bristol Airport because their travel authorisations were tied to passports they’d renewed this year, and an ETA follows the passport rather than the player. They were held for hours whilst the squad went on without them, and it took the French embassy and the mayor of Bordeaux to get them cleared late that night.
On Friday night it took him five touches to score twice. A volley to clear Charlie Atkinson’s chip at 31 minutes; the line off Lucu’s long pass for Uberti’s try in the 47th minute; the finish at 50 minutes when Lucu went right off a held-up maul and Bielle-Biarrey arrived in the 13-14 channel and simply outpaced everyone; the aerial take off Lucu’s bomb at 62 minutes, won a long way above anybody else; and the finish a minute later after Lucu had gone through a hole and the forward pod had found him. Three clean breaks in five touches. Then Page-Relo went off and he played the last 10 minutes at fly-half, because there was nobody else to do it.
It took the French embassy to get him through passport control; Gloucester’s defence had no such help and he was through it in considerably less time. Deport him.
Want more from Planet Rugby? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list for world-class coverage you can trust.
The men who made it, and the two scrums that ended it
Robson was the best bald Test nine on the pitch, which with Lucu moved to 10 was an uncontested title. Willis, on his first game back in England since leaving Saracens, was the visitors’ stormer: 17 carries, 14 tackles, seven defenders beaten and two turnovers, plus the hold-up over the Gloucester line at 30. The man who left Saracens partly over a plastic pitch refuses to be put down on one. Clement matched his 17 carries and led everyone with 107 metres, so both sides got plenty from the eight shirt; Morgan‘s turnover and Lake’s running commentary to the referee were the Welsh audition in two acts, Maxime Lamothe was huge before Connor Sa replaced him, and the seasoned Eliot Salt got his first Gloucester minutes.
Barton deserves his own line. He went down with an ankle at 36 and looked done, stayed on, won a ruck straight after the restart, scored, kicked the half’s last penalty and hit the post with the conversion of Trenholm’s first try, the two points that separate a draw from a win.
Which brings us to the end. Gloucester knocked on at their own lineout on the UBB 22 at 78 and a half minutes, and from the scrum that followed Gnecchi, who had refereed an open game with a light hand, had a clear penalty to give the visitors and chose a reset instead. UBB would have had a kick to win it, and they’ll know that on the bus home. The reset was knocked on by UBB, Gloucester had one more scrum of their own thirty seconds past the eighty, and the whistle went at 36-36, UBB’s winning run still standing at sixteen.
READ MORE: Gloucester v Bordeaux-Begles: Result, scorers, match stats, line-ups