Lance Bradley actually said something that I had to agree with, all be it on the Lance Bradley Lovathon on You Tube hosted by Colin Boag. It was one of those things that took me back to the good old days of the Two Colins at Hartpury. If you haven’t watched it’s 50 minutes of Colin asking Lance pre-cleared questions and Lance saying “I’m not really able to go in to too much detail”. It doesn’t make for riveting stuff but if you have the time you can find it here. Hence my feeling sullied!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGd58tbEBIc
The thing that he did discuss that I had to agree with him was when he started talking about Succession Planning. Any businessman knows that to achieve long term growth & success there has to be a Succession Plan, not just for the months ahead, nor even for the next 2 or 3 years, but longer, 5 years and more. And that is something that Gloucester has singularly failed to have for far too long.
Indeed, since 2009 Gloucester have had six head coaches. And during that time it cannot be argued that each head coach has been giving carte blanch to build their own squad, create their own team. Far too often there have been too many cooks and the chef hasn’t been left with full menu control.
But LB seems to have acknowledged this and comments about it and this can only be a good thing. It took time for Chiefs to get to where they are, slowly building, architects of their own future. And from where we were in the early months of 2020 when the very best you can describe us was that we were in disarray, it is clear that we needed to start from scratch and create a plan that would take us to ten years and beyond. And you can already hear about the foundation of that plan. LB says Skivs and the coaching structure will be here for the foreseeable future and must be given the time to build their own squad and create their own team, anything else is pointless and reverts us back to the dark days of last year. And we hear about it when Skivs talks about bringing on academy lads, and there were 11 home grown talents in the team last week so we know it’s not just hot air. We all see every week the talent that has been created here, but playing for other sides.
A few years ago we saw Boy Walkinshaw trying to tempt top talent, coaches, players &c in an attempts to make GRFC look like a viable and thriving business in the hope he could maximise the price he achieved when selling it to finance his racing business. There was no plan in place, just a bunch of big names. Hibbard, Hook, Humphries, Fisher among others. There was no overall idea about how to get all these parts operating together as a single unit……but it looked good. And we enjoyed a lot of it. And there was a modicum of success with the ERCC. But with no plan, and no single person in overall control to create one, it was destined to fail.
So now we have one, now we a have plan. And as I’ve said elsewhere we can just begin to see the tiny green shoots. Things such as giving guys short term contracts or bringing them in on loan to see if they fit in with what’s trying to be achieved. Those that do get rewarded and two names that come to mind there are Reid & Singleton, both of whom have made a cracking impact in their short time with us. We are seeing youngsters being given more time and Seabrooke had a good game at the weekend. Our young props are giving good grunt up front and they frighten me how good they will become in future if they are this good now. Our back row is probably the gnarliest in the prem with huge depth and we now have a second row that is not only winning most of our line outs but successfully challenging opponents, something we haven’t seen for several seasons. And let’s be honest, when you lose two of the most talked about international wingers to the 6 Nations but still have Thorley and Carreras the plan is starting to look good.
Not perfect, we need to sort out a couple of working pairs of half backs with Willi on the move but I think they have a plan for that
winnyssite 