Bath snatch win in tempestuous derby after Gloucester reduced to 11 men

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/apr/12/gloucester-bath-premiership-match-report

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Two red cards and five yellows, a penalty try 90 seconds from time and the win grabbed by Bath with George Ford's last kick of the game added a strange gloss to a game that took an age to get going then exploded all over Kingsholm.

First, Sila Puafisi was shown red for a head-high tackle on Nick Abendanon seven minutes after coming on, then replacement scrum-half Tavis Knoyle was also sent packing for punching the Bath No 8, Leroy Houston.

With Mike Tindall and Huia Edmunds also in the sin-bin, Gloucester ended the day with 11 men, while the referee, Tim Wigglesworth, also showed the yellow card to three Bath players. The referee received an escort as he was booed off the ground, but Gloucester's director of rugby said he knew nothing of suggestions that a bottle had been hurled into the tunnel.

"By then it was a farce," Nigel Davies said, when asked if he had a view on Bath's winning try. "Players work hard to get things right and we would like to think it was across the board. Where is the consistency?"At the end of a day that started quietly enough, Bath continue to have high hopes of a place in the play-offs, and ended their eight-year wait for a league win here. At the start of the day and with Wasps, London Irish and finally Worcester to come, Gloucester were beginning to sniff the possibility that Thursday night's European deal might mean top-table rugby at Kingsholm next season, even if it has to come through a play-off.

However, that dream was finally snuffed out when the Bath pack rumbled for the second time in the match, and, when the maul went down, Wigglesworth ran under the posts. That left Gloucester with a one-point lead while the referee tried to sort out who had punched whom in the fight that followed.

Eighteen minutes earlier, Henry Trinder's breakaway, one of the few redeeming moments in 80 minutes of error followed by bad temper, seemed to have settled it Gloucester's way, especially as Davies's decision to pull off loosehead prop Nick Wood after 56 minutes left the game with uncontested scrums.

Bath against Gloucester comes with an edge. It is not just a local derby – director of rugby Davies called it Gloucester's biggest game of the season – but a clash of cultures, Kingsholm long taking comfort from the nickname Castle Grim while regarding Bath as dandies in jockstraps. There is always an edge, and even though Gloucester are having a season to forget, they still got to within two points of Bath at the Rec on a particularly foul Friday in October. Saturday was a guaranteed sell-out almost two weeks ago and police had roads around the ground closed two hours before kick-off for the street bands to set up.

Inside, the party took a lot longer to get going, although there were plenty of signs of ambition, with both sides ignoring penalty chances in the hope of something better, and Tindall, the 36-year-old veteran of 21 of these derbys, running the ball out from under his own posts.

However, with half the game gone, five penalties had been converted and the best bit of action was ruled illegal when Wigglesworth reckoned Horacio Agulla had been shepherded over the Gloucester line.

At the other end, a similar offence earned Billy Twelvetrees his second penalty before the referee continued to take centre stage, sending Carl Fearns to the sin-bin for killing one of Gloucester's more promising moves, and showing Matt Garvey yellow after he came close to decapitating Gareth Evans with a tackle that might interest the citing officer.

It rather spoiled Bath's record of four yellow cards in the previous 18 matches. Not that Gloucester made anything of either sin-bin, with the score still 9-6 when Garvey returned. Bath did when Puafisi departed, driving their captain, Stuart Hooper, over from a 15-metre lineout that scattered the Gloucester defence.