George Skivington ‘absolutely’ has Gloucester backing says CEO

Former lock Brown made more than 200 appearances for Gloucester as a player and has worked in various capacities within the club over the past 10 years since retiring on the field.

He accepted criticism that the loss was “embarrassing”, apologising to fans – particularly those who travelled to Franklin’s Gardens – and accepting that the club’s Premiership performances have not been good enough.

Gloucester have won 11 Premiership games out of 37 across the past two campaigns.

“Premiership is number one and I don’t think anyone can hide behind that – we’ve not performed there and we need to address that,” Brown said.

However, Brown dismissed criticism that Gloucester had damaged the integrity of the competition by rotating their squad in recent games and fielding such an inexperienced side against Northampton.

“Over the course of the season I think we’ve been very competitive,” he said, pointing to one-point and two-point losses to Exeter and Northampton respectively earlier in the season.

“We’ve prioritised what we need to prioritise and that’s important. We’ve got a raft of injuries and we can’t put out our senior team every week because they can’t manage the load.”

Brown did admit Gloucester’s strength in depth is an issue, although he fell short of saying the club was financially hamstrung.

“We’re trying to run the club sustainably and that does come with its challenges,” Brown added.

“The first 15 on paper are a competing team – the team underneath that, we need to address that and look at that over the course of the off-season and see if we can improve that.

“We just need to get more out of the team within the constraints we’ve got.”