Gloucester v Sale Sharks: Five takeaways as England snub gets ‘standing ovation’ in front of Steve Borthwick and ‘lesson going in’ for Charlie Atkinson

Following a 21-15 victory for Gloucester over Sale Sharks in the PREM Rugby clash on Friday, here’s our five takeaways from Kingsholm.

The top line

Two teams with nothing to play for spent 80 minutes playing for absolutely nothing whatsoever, and Gloucester edged it.

Charlie Atkinson clinched a narrow win over Sale Sharks with three minutes left, finishing off a Max Llewellyn break for the try the home side’s territorial dominance had been threatening for an hour. The scoreboard flattered Sale. The Cherry and Whites spent the evening smashing gorgeous cover drives into the field and getting run out backing up.

The Gloucester fly-half finished the night as Player of the Match with six clean breaks, 16 defenders beaten and 83 metres made, numbers that would lead the Prem most weekends, from a fly-half. He also butchered three line breaks at the moment a teammate was waiting for the pass. The first was a try that fooled itself, a dummy so committed Charlie Atkinson sold it to himself before he sold it to the cover. The second became a 40-metre Tom O’Flaherty counter that nearly cost Gloucester a try. The third was a three-on-one with the line begging, ruined by the simplest part of the move.

The contrast sat 20 metres opposite him in a navy jersey. George Ford did not light Kingsholm on fire on Friday night. Ford rarely needs to. What Ford did was run a backline. Pinpoint passes to the right shoulder. The right kick at the right moment. The unglamorous mechanics of getting 14 other men to the right parts of the pitch at the right time. 15 tackles, every one of them taken because Gloucester targeted his channel deliberately, and a 45-metre drop goal off broken play that put Sale ahead with seven minutes left. Ford’s brain, Charlie Atkinson’s feet, and the line writes itself.

Charlie Atkinson is not a player short on talent. The breaks he made were Test-class. The problem is the order in which the skills sit. The hard things come off, the simple things don’t, and at international level the ratio gets you sat in the stands rather than on the bench. The tutorial on the Kingsholm pitch was the most useful 80 minutes of his season. The late try, finished cleanly off Llewellyn’s break, the first real sign that the lesson is going in.

Walking past open doors

Gloucester finished the night with 65 percent of the territory and 89 percent of it in the second half. They had 83 percent of second-half possession. Sale spent 45 minutes of rugby in their own half and only Ford’s late drop goal got them ahead. The pattern was visible by the 20th minute and chronic by the 70th.

A Matias Alemanno try was chalked off for a knock-on at the line. Afo Fasogbon was held up over the line. Arthur Clark scored a 30-metre run-in that disappeared to a marginal forward pass from Will Trenholm. A pick-and-go on the Sale line went nowhere with four-on-three open in the wide channel. Charlie Atkinson butchered three of his six clean breaks. By the 73rd minute, Gloucester had won every facet of the match the scoreboard does not reward.

Gloucester v Sale Sharks: Result, match stats, line-ups, scorers

The architecture is right. Chris Boyd, watching from New Zealand, would have recognised every shape Gloucester ran. The pace, the geometry, the runners around the ruck, the deliberate targeting of Ford’s defensive channel. The execution failures came at the simplest moments. Knock-ons. Forward passes. Tunnel-vision pick-and-goes. The bits a coach can fix with repetitions in pre-season. Gloucester spent their evening walking past open doors looking for locked ones, and only just got one open before the final whistle.

Sale almost won a match they never played

Sale Sharks fired next to zero attacking shots from sustained possession across 80 minutes. Their first try came from Tom Roebuck catching a long Gloucester kick, lovely interplay down the right touchline with Jacques Vermeulen in support, and Alfie Longstaff finishing in the eighth minute. Their second came from a Gloucester turnover and an O’Flaherty sixty-metre counter. Ford’s drop goal arrived off broken play. Three Sale scoring moments, all three handed to them by Gloucester mistakes or open-pitch turnovers.

O’Flaherty was Sale’s most threatening attacking player on the night, which is what happens when the rest of your strike runners are reduced to mopping up the opposition’s errors. Hyron Andrews’s first start since February was respectable and Rekeiti Ma’asi-White carried hard but none of it amounted to a single piece of manufactured Sale attack. Alex Sanderson’s side got within seven minutes of stealing a Prem match without playing one and Gloucester only just refused to let them.

England’s loss, Gloucester’s gain

Val Rapava-Ruskin spent his evening dismantling two Sale tightheads in front of the man whose job it is to pick the England front-row. Asher Opoku-Fordjour was withdrawn shortly after half-time having conceded three scrum penalties in succession. His replacement, Joe Harper, lasted minutes before conceding a fourth. Sanderson sent Will Austin in to face the same scrum and the description from the press box was lamb to slaughter. Steve Borthwick watched all of it and so did Tom Harrison, the England scrum coach. So did a Kingsholm crowd who stood and applauded Rapava-Ruskin off the field with a standing ovation with the recognition of people who knew exactly what they had just watched.

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Don Felder co-wrote the music for Hotel California, one of the most recognised rock songs ever recorded, and spent the rest of his career playing club dates and small theatres while Don Henley and Glenn Frey filled stadiums. Every guitarist who ever picked up an instrument knew what Felder was. The mainstream never quite caught up. Rapava-Ruskin is the Don Felder of English rugby. A talent the people in the building always recognise, a talent the men with the keys never quite let near the main stage. Some players play arenas, some play their brilliance to bar staff. The Kingsholm bar staff, at least tonight, knew exactly what they were watching.

Seb Atkinson’s England case

Borthwick was at Kingsholm. So was Harrison. The other man they came to watch in the Gloucester backline was Seb Atkinson, currently in direct competition with Bath’s Max Ojomoh for the England inside centre berth. Seb Atkinson delivered the kind of performance that wins those competitions, offering real test-level abrasion in contact with direct lines that broke the gain-line every time he carried. A defensive head-to-head with Ma’asi-White, the most threatening contact carrier in the Sale backline, was won decisively across the night by the Gloucester star.

The Ojomoh duel will run all the way to the summer. Both players are doing the right things in the right phases of the season. Seb Atkinson’s evening at Kingsholm did not catch the eye in highlight reels. The Borthwick coaching ticket does not rate centres on highlight reels. They rate them on barrelling, gain-line and defensive shape, and the centre logged 80 minutes of all three. He left with the case for the 12 jersey just slightly more advanced than it was at kick-off, and Ojomoh has a fortnight to respond.

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