202 : Leinster v Gloucester wrap

TOM COLEMAN

NATHAN JOHNS

Earlier this year, Gloucester Rugby lock, Ed Slater, announced his retirement from the game with immediate effect after his diagnosis with Motor Neurone Disease (MND).

To help support Ed and his family, Gloucester Rugby opened a JustGiving page and to date over £220,000 has been raised to help support Ed, his wife Jo and their three children.

With Gloucester Rugby playing Leinster Rugby last weekend in the Heineken Champions Cup, both clubs wanted to mark the occasion and also use the opportunity to highlight Ed’s illness and to try and raise even more funds for him and his family.

As a result, two unique Leinster Rugby and Gloucester Rugby jerseys were signed by the match day squads, with both jerseys bearing his name and the number four.

Captains Garry Ringrose and Ben Meehan presented the jerseys to each other before the game and the jerseys will now be used as a raffle item on the Leinster Rugby Instagram account.

To enter, you only need to reply to the post on Instagram and then donate a minimum of £20/€20 to the JustGiving page set up for the Slater family.

The winners will need to show proof of donation before their prize will be allocated to them.

To donate, please click HERE.

Conor Cronin There are a lot of things to be said about playing the team in front of you, and let’s be honest, the team in front of us were less than brilliant.

But! Let’s acknowledge that they were good for the last 20 mins in a way that they weren’t for the first 60 and kept us relatively quiet. Lots of fans expected 70+ points over the 80 mins and a second string Gloucester kept us very far from that, and that stems from a lack of cohesion, and a few players misfiring at a couple of moments. 50 22 kicks that missed, territorial kicks going dead, passes going loose… There are some things that could be worked on. And there’s no harm in that. Let’s work on simple passes, on making sure that that first receiver’s takes the ball cleanly, that the first receiver is ready for the pass… Let’s make sure that the simple stuff goes right so that against stronger opposition we aren’t losing territory or points

Chris McDonnell Mcgrath is so slow and his pass is awful, he rarely moves the ball to the backs either. It was like watching matt o’connor rugby. How we let patterson go and kept mcgrath baffles me

Kevin Joyce There’s been a lot of talk about what the Gloucester team selection means for the competition. First of all, I’d like to say that I agree that the current format is bad, but it’s absolutely not to blame for what we witnessed tonight. The idea behind the change was to eliminate dead rubbers, but what hope have we of doing that when a team that had a perfect start to the tournament decides to raise the white flag in their second game? As long as the English and French clubs continue to be arrogant enough to believe their domestic leagues are more important than a European competition, no amount of format changes can prevent Gloucester from doing what they did tonight. The only way to completely eliminate dead rubbers would be to add 8 teams and turn the tournament into a straight knockout, but even then, if Gloucester were drawn against Leinster in the first round, they would absolutely surrender and pick a B team like they did tonight, because that’s exactly the kind of club they are and the loser mentality they have. So good luck in the premiership Gloucester, but you’ve about as much chance of winning it as you have of winning the Heineken.