Not the biggest thrashing in Premiership history, maybe, but this was the sort of non-contest to give a competition a bad name. There was something dispiriting about the inevitability of what unfolded, albeit enlivened by a pair of quickfire hat-tricks, each harvested in less than a quarter of an hour.
Tom Parton did make Premiership history with his hat-trick, the third scored 25 seconds into the 21st minute, breaking David Strettle’s record for the earliest hat-trick 11 years ago, also for Saracens. That set up a scoreline that read 32-0 on the hour, when Josh Hathaway scored his first hat-trick for Gloucester. He racked his up in 13 minutes, which was even quicker than Parton, who scored his in 15. If only the previous hour had not happened, the record would have been his.
So Saracens keep up the heat at the top of the table, as we knew they would. Gloucester, who scored again at the death, this by Seb Blake, managed to emerge with a bonus point, not that it will do them much good. They are too far adrift to worry the queue of teams chasing a place in the playoffs. Their minds are fixed on the Challenge Cup, here making 11 changes to the team that beat Ospreys last Friday to make the semi-finals.
There is plenty of talk, as there periodically seems to be in European competition, about teams fielding understrength sides. Then again, we cannot complain about players being flogged one minute, then about teams resting players the next. So fair enough, Gloucester, your prerogative.
That did not make the result any less inevitable, though. Saracens were a mixed bag throughout. At times, their play seemed effortless, Alex Goode pulling strings at full-back as masterfully as ever. But the way they conceded those four tries in the final quarter, three of them in the last 10 minutes, must grate.
“Five points was really important today,” said Mark McCall. “From a performance point of view it was mixed. We’ve been like that for a lot of the season. There are glimpses of what we can do, but there’s also a big discrepancy between us at our best and us at our worst. We’ve just got to figure out how we aren’t better for longer during matches.”
Parton’s first two tries were almost exact replicas of each other; a Saracens attacking lineout followed by sweet hands by Owen Farrell and Goode for a simple try in the corner. His third came from another attacking lineout, this time Aled Davies breaking blind to set him up.
At that point, there was a feeling of the duck shoot about proceedings. All of Parton’s tries felt too easy. But George Skivington kept his cool in the changing room at half-time. He had picked a young team who were being punished for their enthusiasm as much as anything.
“We gave away three or four penalties for offside, which I think was a few young lads trying to jump the gun a little bit,” he said. “There was no hairdryer treatment at all. I’m respectful of the team I’ve brought and of the team Saracens fielded. For me to be spraying them at half-time because of the position we were in would be wrong.”
His young team’s education continued into the second half. Theo McFarland plucked Farrell’s cross-kick out of the clutches of Jake Morris to score the bonus-point try a couple of minutes into the second half. And so we had our narrative more or less complete.
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That said, this is the era of the comeback, so we should have expected some sort of a reaction, even though the game was long done. Tom Willis extended Saracens’ lead from another attacking lineout, this one driven to the line, before Hathaway scored the first of his tries on the hour. Blake, a live-wire replacement at hooker, set it up with a chip, before Hathaway notched two poacher’s tries in two minutes.
By then Olly Hartley, who was carried off on a stretcher with a serious looking knee injury long after the final whistle, and Lucio Cinti had put Saracens even further out of sight, but Gloucester kept coming in the final minutes. Their reward was Blake’s try at the death for a bonus point of their own. Then both sides headed off for more important dates in the next couple of weeks.
