Gloucester find ‘belief’ in new attacking style of play says coach

Evidence of Gloucester’s new style was visible during their first game of the campaign against Saracens, despite the result ending in defeat.

They occupied the top three places across the league statistics for line breaks through Williams, Max Llewellyn and George Barton, while they made the most visits to a 22 of any team during round one.

“We learned what we were capable of in the last half an hour, 20 minutes against Saracens,” said centre Seb Atkinson.

“We said we’d have to do that for 80 minutes no matter what the score, what the momentum of the game is, we’ve got to create our own momentum through trying to play with the ball and get the ball in the hands of the people that are most exciting.”

With a new style comes a new training regime however and Lightfoot-Brown said the players have had to build a different type of fitness, particularly stop-start sprints over short distances.

“We need to get really used to repeating them at a high level with good timing to challenge defences. The more you can do that the more you can be accurate at the line with good changes of pace to challenge defences,” Lightfoot-Brown said.

“The important thing is that we keep worrying about ourselves and make sure that we’re on the money with our processes, our timing, our breakdown.

“If we do that I think we’ve got enough quality within the team to challenge any defence that we come up against.”