Wales playmaking star under injury cloud while ‘cheeky’ club and Test team-mate once again ‘delivers’ in fine Premiership win

Gloucester and Wales fly-half Gareth Anscombe and Cherry and Whites head coach George Skivington.
Although Gloucester were in fine form in Saturday’s 36-20 Premiership victory over Sale Sharks, they will be sweating over the fitness of Wales fly-half Gareth Anscombe who left the field due to injury.
The Cherry and Whites dominated the encounter at Kingsholm from the outset and raced into a 22-10 lead, but the 33-year-old only lasted until half-time when he limped off with a knee injury.
It was an eventful day for Gloucester‘s Wales contingent as behemoth flyer Max Llewellyn and scrum-half Tomos Williams were among their try-scorers, but it’s the injury to Anscombe which was a big talking point after the match.
He was replaced by George Barton and Gloucester head coach George Skivington revealed that Anscombe’s departure was a precautionary measure.
‘He wasn’t moving particularly well’
“He took a bang on the knee. I talked to him at half-time and he wasn’t moving particularly well, so we knocked it on the head,” Skivington said after the match.
“We could have pushed him out and kept him playing but I am not an advocate of doing that. I tend to whip lads off when I feel they are not quite 100 per cent.
“Hopefully, it is nothing too serious.”
Meanwhile, Anscombe’s half-back partner and international team-mate, Williams, earned special praise from Skivington after another superb all-round performance.
“Tomos was great again today. He has delivered on and off the field. He is just full of energy and links our play up well,” he said.
“He is a cheeky chap. He has a laugh and all the rest of it but when it comes to training and playing, he is on it, he is not messing around any more, and his ability to flick the switch between the two is great.
“He is engaged, he wants to win, he is competitive, and his influence will rub off on the young lads here.”
Sale came into this fixture chasing their fourth successive victory but were no match for Gloucester’s attacking game and Skivington’s troops eventually outscored their visitors by five tries to three.
“It is very hard work to attack the way we attack,” he added. “The boys are working hard on things like timing and lines of running.
‘We have got trust in the players’
“There is a huge amount of work that goes into it and we have seen the pay-off from that. We have got trust in the players. They have got 100 per cent backing from me to go for it.”
Meanwhile, Sale director of rugby Alex Sanderson said: “We gave ourselves some opportunities to at least get something out of the game.
“What I was most frustrated about was how we pulled the trigger in that second half compared to the first half, when we looked as if we were playing within ourselves.
“You don’t win games by conceding 36 points often, away from home at Kingsholm, so we have to have a look at our system defence. The intent was there but I don’t think system-wise we were on the same page.
“A couple of changes and we seemed to lose a bit of system, people coming out of system and trying to solve things by themselves. Against the best attacking sides when you are doing that, they can pick you off all too easily, which they did.”
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