How Gloucester’s ‘balls out for the Challenge Cup’ attitude has won fans over

Gloucester are desperate to frame their rollercoaster season in a positive light by winning the European Challenge Cup final.

The opposition from the Sharks will be tough, with World Cup winners Eben Etzebeth, Ox Nche, Bongi Mbonambi, Vincent Koch and Makazole Mapimpi among the South Africans’ stars, although centre Lukhanyo Am is out injured.

Gloucester’s Cherry and Whites finished a woeful Premiership campaign second from bottom last weekend, for the third time in the last four years.

But the prize for winning the Challenge Cup at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Friday is entry into next season’s top-tier Champions Cup, knocking Leicester out in the process.

And it would take the pressure off director of rugby George Skivington and his staff after losing 13 of their 18 Premiership matches and finishing above only winless Newcastle.

Gloucester have been unabashed about saying the cup competitions have been the priority as they approach their fifth final in rugby’s equivalent of football’s Europa League.

Lewis Ludlow, the captain, tells i the squad took the decision after they lost nine straight matches in the Premiership from October to January.

“It was a buy-in from everyone and the focus was ‘right, we’re going to go out and win these two cups’, and that was openly said.

“We weren’t throwing our hands up and saying ‘right, the league’s done’. But it had been a nine-week slog and really tough for a lot of the boys, we were losing players all over the place.

“It was just a factor of ‘this is where the Prem’s going to be, this is what our work-ons are going to be’, and the excitement around the squad when it came to Challenge Cup and Premiership Cup games, it was like a new lease of life.

“It was a brilliant reset to say ‘this is what we’re going to do, let’s fly into it and see how we get on’.

“It’s very hard to be competitive on all three fronts, when you’ve got the best squads in the world and the most money and all this sort of stuff.

“We were working with a lot of injuries, we pulled our game back a bit and dialled in on stuff we were good at and went around it that way. We’ve won one cup and we’ve got the chance to put the other one right on Friday.”

Gloucester have posted 14 wins out of 14 in this season’s two cup competitions, with seven in the Premiership Cup including the final victory over Leicester at Ealing in March.

But concentrating on the cups was a risky line to take in the face of some of the most loyal supporters in English club rugby, not least when a rotated Gloucester team was smashed 90-0 at Northampton a fortnight ago.

Bob Rumble is chairman of the independent supporters group Kingsholm Supporters’ Mutual (KSM), which has 5,000-plus members and was originally formed more than 20 years ago when a shareholding in the club was briefly in the offing.

Rumble says there will be questions over Skivington if Friday’s final goes badly but he also believes the majority of supporters will keep the faith.

“The burden of expectation is still burning bright at Gloucester, and it can become painful for coaches and players when it continues to go wrong,” Rumble tells i.

“If we win this week, some will want to see Skivington on an open-top bus. If we lose, it’ll be ‘he’s got to go tomorrow’. Honestly, though, it’s a very small minority of people who are massively disappointed.”

Asked about the notorious 90-0, Rumble rates the 51-point beating at Bristol in December and 47-25 by Bath at Kingsholm in November as even lower points. “We got mashed and shredded by Bath – can you imagine what that’s like?” he says with a rueful chuckle. “I felt like signing up for Dignitas.”

KSM organise subsidised away trips, including to all this season’s European games, one highlight being the 15-12 win over Georgia’s Black Lion in Tbilisi.

So how has the line of concentrating on the cups gone down with supporters? “The answer to that is in the attendances,” Rumble says. “Astonishingly we have kept over 11,000 average for every game.

“If you ask how long will that go on, how does anyone know. Year after year, we haven’t been great. On the other hand, at £300,000 last year, we had the smallest loss among the Premiership clubs. [Owner] Martin St Quinton’s edict is it’s got to be self-sustaining.

“Hope springs eternal. Over the last 10 years, we had one blindingly good season where we finished fifth, and one finish in the play-offs in third [in 2019]. But it’s not that discouraging when you analyse the people who support Gloucester.

“In general they are not Johnny-come-latelys, and it’s not all just dependent about winning. Of course winning helps make you happy but there is a huge nucleus of support there that people rock up and support anyway.

“I remember a game we lost fair and square in Colomiers in 2000, and [then owner] Tom Walkinshaw came round to thank the Gloucester supporters, and someone said it was disgraceful the players had trooped off, and they need to come and stick their chests out, and they did.

“It is so, so different now. The players come round, win or lose; they do selfies at the Shed and have a chat. Kids like the scrum-half [Caolan] Englefield climbs over the barrier and goes among the supporters. Not swanking, just discussing.

“There is very much a family attitude, and that connection has been highlighted by George Skivington since he has been here, and it’s bloody good.

“After we won the European semi-final, a raft of players poured into Teague’s Bar [opposite Kingsholm] and had a jolly time. Alex Brown is tip-top to deal with, and in Tbilisi, George Skivington gave us an address on the morning of the match that broke the ice with a lot of the rank and file. He told us some time ago we would be going balls out for the Challenge Cup.”

Among those charged with running a tight budget, chief executive Lance Bradley left Gloucester last summer (and is now at Ospreys), with former player Alex Brown stepping into the breach, while Carl Hogg’s post as director of Gloucester’s academy and development was recently made redundant.

Among the players, Wales wing Louis Rees-Zammit quit Gloucester in mid-season to try out for the NFL.

And Rumble says key injuries hit hard: “Matias Alemanno, our Argentina lock, played his third World Cup on the bounce, then he was injured. [Centre] Mark Atkinson has retired and played his last game in December. [Prop] Val Rapava Ruskin has missed almost the entire season.

“[Fly-half] Adam Hastings has had a wretched time – while he’s been here, he’s had ops on a shoulder, knee and ankle. Zach Mercer signed last summer and in November had a desperate ankle injury.

“We let [hooker] Jack Singleton go on loan to Toulon then George McGuigan tore a hamstring in March – you couldn’t make it up. So is it a surprise we got left behind in the league? No.

Ludlow pinpoints Hastings’s unavailability at No 10 as the most significant problem.

“Look at the 2021-22 season, when we finished fifth,” Ludlow says. “That was the one year Adam was consistently fit. Injuries are part of rugby and the bloke’s had his share, bless him.

“That year he played 20 games and you ask anyone in the league, the consistency of your nines and 10s is massive because that’s your game plan, they are your controllers.

“Sarries lose Owen Farrell and look what happens. Bath with Finn Russell look a different team without him. ‘Hasto’ was a big one for us.”

Hearteningly, Hastings and Argentinian full-back Santi Carreras are in contention for Friday’s final – Hastings for the first time since the semi-final, while Carreras has missed more than a month since having his appendix removed.

At 41, Skivington is the youngest director of rugby in the Premiership, having succeeded Johan Ackermann in 2020.

He and assistants Dom Waldouck, James Lightfoot-Brown and Trevor Woodman have enjoyed rousing Challenge Cup victories away to Black Lion in Georgia and Edinburgh in Scotland and at home to Clermont Auvergne, Ospreys and Benetton Treviso, and they can point to last season in the Champions Cup when they won away to Bordeaux-Begles and lost narrowly in La Rochelle.

Skivington and defence coach Waldouck also had the honour of helping coach the England A team in February, in an easy win over a weak Portugal team.

Ludlow praises Skivington’s way of working. “The biggest thing for me is the honesty,” the skipper says.

“The times the squad is going to be rotated, he has come in on a Monday and said ‘boys, this is what’s going to happen. So-and-so has been in my office saying he hasn’t played for six weeks – right, there you go, Saracens away. Hardest game in the Premiership, go and do it’.

“It’s been pretty dark at times but it’s never been too dark. I’ve been here when it’s been dark and players are moaning and arguing, and there’s no craic off the pitch, and so on. The squad has been tight, the coaching group have been tight.

“People forget we beat Benetton who had 21 Italian internationals. The Ospreys team had 10-plus Welsh internationals. They were my two favourite games this year in terms of a team that was galvanised.

“We attacked like we’ve been speaking about for so long, the maul was working out, our defence was good shutting people down, and letting our backs loose and everyone knows they are so dangerous.

“It just needs to be in the right areas, and in those two games and Newcastle last weekend it was in the right areas.”

It’s a circular coincidence that Wales fly-half Gareth Anscombe, whose game management and last-minute penalty kick helped Cardiff to that 2018 Challenge Cup final win, is joining Gloucester next season, along with international colleague, scrum-half Tomos Williams, and the flying former England wing Christian Wade.

“The Welsh half-backs are interesting signings,” says Rumble. “The way Anscombe reads a game could make a big difference.”

Ludlow says: “Something we definitely will be rectifying next year is where we need to be in the Premiership. Because finishing in that position is just not good enough for our club.”