Anscombe seals glory for Blues
GARETH ANSCOMBE kicked a dramatic last-minute penalty to complete a superb comeback by Cardiff Blues to take the European Challenge Cup.
Wales’s adopted Kiwi kept his nerve from 30 metres out as the Blues punished Gloucester for the late sin-binning of Lewis Ludlow in Bilbao.
Blaine Scully’s try out wide on the right opened the door and then Anscombe, who had missed a tough conversion, pushed the Welsh region through it to give them the trophy for the second time in their history.
Gloucester coach Johan Ackermann was chasing a trophy in his first season since arriving at Kingsholm from South Africa.
It was a contentious appointment in some quarters given that he served a two-year drugs ban in his playing career but the
CARDIFF GLOUCESTER
back-of-the-hand pass to Lewis Ludlow was adjudged forward.
It was a stay of execution though for the Blues as Gloucester carved their defence up to engineer a superb try from centre Mark Atkinson in the 38th minute.
Billy Twelvetrees was the engineer inside his own half, freeing Trinder down the left and after Braley had supplied the support Atkinson thundered over.
With Twelvetrees landing four out of four with the boot Gloucester led 20-6 at the interval.
Blues prop Taufa’ao Filise, who had become the oldest man to play in a European final when he took the field a fortnight shy of his 41st birthday, did well to last a half in a breathless Challenge Cup final before being substituted.
Scrum-half Tomos Williams pulled the Blues back into the game to score early in the second period.
And when Garyn Smith went over for a try four minutes later from a neat chip by Jarrod Evans converted by the stand-off, the Blues suddenly had the lead.
Back bounced Gloucester with a lineout rumble finished off by hooker James Hanson and Twelvetrees booted the conversion.
But the yellow card to Ludlow proved crucial as Scully went over in the corner.
Anscombe’s conversion drifted across the posts but he kept his cool with that last penalty to seal cup glory for the Welsh club and break Gloucester hearts. IT WAS Monday morning, September 5, 2016, and Stuart Lancaster had not long stepped off the 6.30am flight from Leeds/Bradford Airport to Dublin.
It had been 10 months since his tenure with England had ended in tears after a group stage exit at their home World Cup. He was, in the eyes of English rugby, a failure.
The Leinster rugby squad, whom Lancaster was about to address, probably had their doubts too about this new ‘senior coach’ who had been sprung on them that day after the sudden departure of Kiwi defence coach Kurt McQuilken back to New Zealand.
“I stood in front of those 60 players and my opening line was, ‘I think we can do great things here...I think we can win Europe’.” said Lancaster. “Most of the players just looked at me. They had lost to Connacht in the Pro12 final and come bottom of their pool in Europe the previous season. They had lost to Wasps by an aggregate score of over 100. It wasn’t a great season.
“Then I said, ‘Let me tell you the reason why’. I had been able to analyse the final and those Wasps games and everything else. So I put it on the board, showed them clips of how we could improve and they bought into it straight away.”
Twenty months on, Leinster can fulfil Lancaster’s prophecy when they face Racing 92 today in the Champions Cup final and complete the circle for the man who came back from the abyss. Reliving the numbing emptiness of that World Cup failure and its aftermath, when three and a half years of painstaking restoration work on a dystopic England collapsed under the blowtorch heat of the tournament remains searingly difficult.
“I still look back with huge regret that we didn’t do better in the World Cup,” he said.
“We got a lot of things right in the build-up to it but, having been 20-12 up, things didn’t go well for about half an hour of the Wales game and that changed everything. It was tough, particularly for my parents, when criticism was coming my way.”
When the inevitable happened and Lancaster lost the head coach’s job on the back of it, he moped around for a while waiting for the phone to ring. It didn’t. He was damaged goods.
“It is very difficult when you are out of work, waiting, hoping you will get an opportunity,” he said. “The main thing is a lack of purpose. Not having a team to coach was really eating away at me, not being able to put anything right and just having to sit there thinking about it.”
And then, just as he was wondering if that World Cup might have finished him in top-level coaching, came the call from Dublin.
It was a hands-on coaching job rather than a director of rugby role but he had no problem with that. His primary regret with England had been in allowing himself to grow more and more distant from the day-to-day coaching. He still