Gloucester go in for the kill

13 April 2012

They dragged Mike Teague from the Cotswold Vale Foxhunt back to his old stamping ground at lunchtime on Saturday for a private ceremony in the home dressing room.

In persuading their indestructible old Lion to give up an afternoon on horseback for a blood sport of a different kind, Gloucester's management pulled a psychological masterstroke.

What Teague said and did set the tone for Cardiff's annual hounding from Europe, their expensive squad being run to ground in the old-fashioned way by a pack under the command, ironically enough, of Welshman Kingsley Jones.

Teague played his last match for the club in April 1995, 16 years after the first, and had not been back to the inner sanctum until coach Philippe Saint-Andre and team manager John Brain persuaded him to give the foxes a break, address the troops and present them with their jerseys.

'Iron Mike,' who once famously knocked himself out nine seconds after the start of a Wales-England match but who, more famously, went all the way to the 1991 World Cup Final, gave them some typically straight-from-the-shoulder stuff about the historical significance of the fixture and the mystique of the club jersey .

His entrance took the players by surprise and his words had a profound effect, particularly on Trevor Woodman. Teague helped nurse the Cornish prop back to peak condition from six months' rest to cure a bulging disc, which had prevented him consolidating his position as leading successor to Jason Leonard's loosehead throne.

'Mike was very calm and very straightforward,' said Woodman. 'He told us that this was a massive game for the club, that we should think of all the players who had gone before us, that they would have given anything to be playing and that we were therefore the lucky ones. Coming from Mike Teague, that was quite something.'

It may have been pure coincidence but Woodman responded with the game of his life in the 21- 15 win. That he stood out among so many outstanding forward performances among his team-mates says everything about him and if that failed to shove him up the Lions' ratings in full view of Graham Henry and Andy Robinson, nothing will.

Teague said: 'They'd asked me to hand out the jerseys before and I'd always resisted because they don't want some old feller like me. I gave up a day's hunting to do it but it was real bodies-on-the-line stuff and I loved every minute of it.'

A tie which sadly confirmed Cardiff's enduring status as the biggest bottlers in Europe should explode the theory peddled in some quarters that Saint-Andre had lost the plot.

After a difficult few weeks made all the more fraught by whispers of dressing-room intrigue, Gloucester had marked their arrival in the last eight of the Heineken Cup the previous Saturday in their own inimitable way. What began as a celebratory drink in downtown Rome ended with two of the local lads left in the pack hitting seven bells out of each other.

Neither made the starting XV but the club managed to make it sound almost like a natural piece of team-bonding. 'Yes, an unfortu-nate incident,' said Brain, before giving it a Mandleson-esque spin. 'Actually, they are the best of mates and sometimes they do fight. We'll be looking into it.'

Of course, they will, but do not expect any Draconian measures even if the punch-up happened in full view of some Gloucester fans.

Imagine, therefore, what kind of ring- side seats they might be treated to should the European season end with a final against Stade Francais in Paris and The Shed-Heads doing a lap of honour on the Champs Elysees.

Their dominance of Cardiff at scrum and line-out added up to a personal triumph for Saint-Andre in his predictable choice of strategy. With recurring problems behind the scrum, they were never going to play more than a 10-man game and there were times when it scarcely stretched that far given Simon Mannix's first-half trio of missed penalties.

Despite their massive superiority up front, Gloucester failed to score a try but Cardiff conceded penalties at such a rate that, at one stage, the count stood at 20-6 in Gloucester's favour. Yet, referee Joel Jutge refused to use the sinbin. Mannix kicked six and Byron Hayward one to cancel out tries from Nick Walne and Gareth Thomas.

Cardiff's failure to reach the last four raises questions over the future of coach Lyn Howells, Henry's assistant with Wales and it will do nothing for Welsh morale ahead of Saturday's England match.

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Gloucester go in for the kill

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