GLOUCESTER’S 32-23 win at Newport Gwent Dragons on Sunday was an enormous boost to the club’s aspirations.
The Biarritz win seems to have kick-started a struggling outfit that often looked clueless in the big games - and now we can possibly look forward to the side performing at something like its true potential.
Two wins do not promise the world, but two losses might have signalled more doom and gloom among the loyal supporters. The club is now still in Europe, albeit in the second-tier Amlin Challenge Cup and against Wasps on their own patch. However, anybody on any ground is infinitely better than nobody anywhere.
This was a rare away victory and the records suggest that it was only the second such win in more than a year, which is a truly remarkable (though hardly enviable) statistic for a club like Gloucester.
Of course, a change of coach will not have helped matters, but that change happened a long time ago now in sporting terms. Professional players have to adapt to the circumstances and personnel around them and make a good fist of things.
The Gloucester squad is almost completely comprised of international players and none of them will go to their international team and plead that their method of playing differs from Gloucester’s.
Top players adapt. They have the skills and resources to fit in with what is required and most should have a skill and mental base to cope with whatever is required. That has not altered since the amateur days and the modern-day pro really ought to have more at his disposal to cope with whatever style or problem confronts him.
One major problem in the modern professional game that the players cannot be blamed for is the frequent occurrence of injuries. They have increased at an alarming rate of 20 per cent since 2003 and a major area of concern is that two previously uncommon injuries, anterior cruciate ligament ruptures and foot fractures, were responsible for 50 per cent of the increase.
However, once you get away from these two specific injuries, it is not difficult to spot why players are getting injured so much. The professional schedule allows vast amounts of time for weights, so the players everywhere are massive. But the human frame must have a limit on what it can sustain in collisions, however much the six-packs glisten on the club calendar.
Tom McNab, a very successful athletics coach, used to help us rugby coaches when fitness was starting to become increasingly important and he preached that ‘You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe’.
This was quickly translated into the belief that the players’ bodies had to be turned from canoes into aircraft carriers and the evolution began. The weights regimes will not be abandoned and we can look forward to even bigger players making even bigger hits in the future. And the natural consequence will be more boring games of attrition and more injured players. Cannon fodder?
There is, however, a different route for the weights regime. The people who trained triple-jumper Jonathan Edwards, one of the world’s most successful athletes of all time, devised a weights programme for him that produced more power without more bulk and weight as this would have been counter-productive in his athletic event. He became unbelievably powerful yet managed to look pretty normal in build.
Perhaps the modern professional rugby game should start looking at what he did, because the players’ bodies will not be able to sustain the current training regime and the intensity of attritional rugby that we see too often nowadays.
Do you agree with Keith? Have your say below.
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