Edinburgh V Gloucester 13/9/24

We're back baby

Welcome back to ERS for another season with Edinburgh Rugby. How are we all feeling about it? Excited? Nervous? Nervous and excited? Or are you a bit unsure.

only 1 pre-season game? First time ever in our history that we haven’t played 2 warm up games. Last year as you’ll recall there were even two home warm ups. No one has said why this is the case except for Stevie Lawrie, “ we felt (it) was enough.”

Click here if you want see a list of all our previous pre-season results.

Could it be the amount of rugby that some of our players have played in the last 12 months? Since the beginning of August 2023 the likes of Schoeman, Ritchie, Ashman and Healy have been involved in a Summer Nations Series, a World Cup, a league season(albeit one without knockout games), European rugby, 6 Nations and a tour of the Americas.

Maybe it is how Everitt likes to do things. He was probably appointed too late last year to have an input on this. Or maybe we just couldn’t find anyone who wanted to play us. One game it is then and it least it will give us a look at Gloucester before we travel to them later in the year for our Challenge Cup game.

This will be the 2nd of 3 matches we’ll play against the Kingsholm side in 2024. The first was on 13th January and saw us narrowly lose 20-21 at home. There were a few notables that day not least I found myself having to applaud an opposition try from Louis Rees-Zammit. That was his last game of rugby, but it was also the last time we saw our own elusive and hard to stop winger Darcy Graham. How fitting that he returns against the same opposition this weekend. We have missed him enormously. More, I think than we would miss any other player in the squad.

Interestingly, Gloucester have replaced Rees- Zammit in their squad with Christian Wade who himself spent a couple of years trying to make it in the NFL as a running back. Between October 2018 and April 2022 he was nominally attached to the Buffalo Bills but didn’t progress past the practice squads. Early indications are that Rees-Zammit’s NFL career may be similar as he has missed out on a starting berth for the Kansas City Chiefs and is now in the practice squad for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

In any case Wade returned to rugby for the following 22-23 season and spent the next two years with Racing 92 where he made 25 appearances and scored 10 tries before moving Kingsholm for the forthcoming season.

Gloucester’s other acquisitions are Welsh halfback pair, Tomos Williams and Gareth Anscombe. They’ve also brought in England aged grade international tighthead Alfie Petch from Biarritz.

The man who delivered the coup de grâce in that game in January, Adam Hastings has, as i’m sure you all know, joined Glasgow for this season so he’ll get another chance to shoosh us a bit later in the season. The other notable departure from Gloucester is Jonny May who has joined Soyaux Angouleme (easy for you to say) in the French Pro D2. Incidentally, there is quite some list of well known names that have joined May in that league. Click here if you want to see the whole list.

Gloucester have already played a warm up game against Munster in Ireland last Friday which they won 19-33. They took a 29 man squad with them and all of them played at least a half. All Gloucester’s points came in the first 40 when what looks like their first XV was on the field.

Seeing as we are kicking the season off against what will be subsequent European opposition, here’s a quick rundown on how our other European opponents seasons have gone so far.

Bayonne won both of their pre-season friendlies v PRO D2 sides Provence and Biarritz before opening their Top14 campaign at home against Perpignan. Perpignan were in front from the 6th to the 75th minute until a penalty from Bayonne replacement 10 Joris Segonds gave them the points.

Our other French opponents Vannes lost in a warm up v Lyon and then played their first ever Top14 game against a Toulouse side that had Blair Kinghorn in the 14 jersey. BK wasn’t the only former Edinburgh man on the field as Anton Bresler was in the second row for Vannes. A lovely bit of play from BK helped Toulouse open the scoring after only 2 minutes and they won the game 18-43. The scoreline didn’t reflect how well Vannes fought against the champions though.

Black Lion’s season kicks off later this weekend against Spanish side Castilla y León in the Rugby Europe Super Cup.

As well as that detailed one pre-season match answer Stevie Lawrie also gave a big up (see I’m down with the kids) to Euan McVie. He joins another 14 Edinburgh players in a hybrid Edinburgh/Glasgow squad that takes on Ulster on Friday afternoon at Scotstoun. A unique opportunity for the squad but I was hoping we’d see some of them in the second half v Gloucester.

In that same interview Stevie Lawrie spoke about a 34 man squad for this game and the opening 5 games. 30 of these players have been selected to play this game. Here’s the graphic with the full team(s).

Sean Everitt said this wasn’t a 1st and 2nd XV but come on.

Outlaw Josey Wales

OK, if you are being pedantic it’s maybe a first XII or maybe a XIII. What jumps out though?

This is the first game since Clermont in December 2023 that Ben Healy hasn’t started. Does it mean anything? It might because the rest of that backline seems to have an attacking bent whereas the 2nd half XV backline is perhaps a little more defensive looking. A new approach?

Up front, injury has denied us a chance to see whether Javan Sebastian or Paul Hill is at the top of the list for that tighthead berth.

It’ll be good to see the 6ft 11in (mandatory mention) Rob Carmichael at second row in the second half. He looked good in the A games last season so this is a chance for him to step up.

The double team sheet does show starkly that if we keep our back 3 players fit that we have a glut of talent in that area. It’s hard to see Boff in the ‘2nd XV’ but who do you remove to accommodate him? I know the three I’d prefer to see but that ain’t going to happen.

Good luck to Lewis Wells making his senior team debut.

Gloucester travel with a similarly large squad of 30 odd players. Click here to see the full list.

We first played Gloucester in a pre -season friendly in 1999. We travelled to Kingsholm on the same day that Scotland faced Romania at Hampden. After a delayed start to the game due to our flight into Bristol arriving late we lost 31-13 to the Philippe Saint-Andre coached side. Edinburgh’s points were courtesy of Chris Patterson - 2 pens, a try and a conversion. Here’s the team sheet.

It’s great to be back at ERS for an Edinburgh game. There’s been sport a-plenty over the summer and even some rugby to keep us going but most of it was just diversionary whilst counting down the days till Edinburgh run out of that Murrayfield stand tunnel again. I suspect there will be a good crowd for this game and we will all have differing expectations for this and the season to come. If you accept that it’s easy to support a team that wins tournaments and competitions then the corollary must also hold yet we keep turning up and in increasing numbers.

Last season was our highest ever average attendance across all competitions and yet we know how bad it was based on the number of players and coaching staff doing media interviews downplaying it. My favourite being Matt Currie who said there’s ‘a little bit of room for growth.”

Gluttons for punishment or eternal optimists it doesn’t really matter. In the end we are all #AlwaysEdinburgh.