Good to see reasonably calm heads here.
The first half was fantastic, the second half was tough to watch.
First half our discipline was great: 2 penalties - McDonald at the maul which disallowed the try for Alfie and Shields for an offside. Second half, 13 penalties (5 at the breakdown/ruck, 3 maul, 3 scrum and 2 offside), 10 of which were defensive. I don't think that we were hard done by for any of them either. We maybe could have had more penalties, but hey-ho we/the team can't control that.
I find the discipline issue so hard at times, it's such a hard thing to coach as well. We were most guilty of the cardinal offence of stacking penalties and loosing huge amounts of territory because penalties in quick succession. I look at the times for penalties I've got here: 47', 48', 51' then 58', 60', 62' then 66', 67', 68' 70', 71' - how can you ever regain momentum like that? Look at the last block for example - we start in the Gloucester half with an attacking scrum which is pinged for wheeling, they kick into our 22 and maul forward and Tom Willis sacks it for a YC and a penalty, another maul and a another YC and a Penalty Try. We then kick off force a scrum in their half, with only 7 forwards we lose that, get kicked downfield and concede another penalty at a maul and they kick 3 points. In 6 minutes, we have lost two players and conceded 10 points and in effect the game because of 5 consecutive penalties.
I will go back to not knowing quite how to prevent that though, very few of our penalties were overly rash, real 'loss of discipline' errors - Tom Willis pulling the maul down probably the most obvious but even then they were already under an advantage for one of those tough maul pens where you think you are legal, get called and try to go back and still give away the penalty because it has hindered the opposition.
The scrum we thought might be an issue as the game wore on. Ryan and Hislop did well enough initially but as they brough on a new front row we were always going to be vulnerable. I'm not overly worried by this, we knew we were going in with our 4th choice loosehead and two tightheads on the bench; Westy will be back soon and when we have out other looseheads and Koch to choose from it won't be an issue.
Plenty of people have pointed out the positives and there were quite a few. We got a bonus point away to Gloucester which I think quite a few of us would have taken before the game. Our D was actually pretty good: they struggled to break us down through phase play and it was only really the Chapman score where Elrington got through that broke our line - No-one could have could LRZ and Clarke was numbers and pressure of 15 battering against 13 and even then we got close to both.
Always a Wasp