Mark McCall rips Saracens’ first-half performance against Gloucester

Saracens’ director of rugby Mark McCall praised his side for how they upped their game to dominate the second half and claim a 36-14 victory against Gloucester at the StoneX Stadium.

The home side trailed 14-12 at half-time and were in danger of losing ground in the race for a play-off place in the Gallagher Premiership, but they overpowered Gloucester in scoring 24 unanswered points after the break.

Not allowing the Cherry and Whites a consolation try at the death pleased McCall the most as Saracens moved up to fourth, three points ahead of today’s opponents and Leicester.

McCall said: “The second half was considerably better than the first half.

“The first half was disappointing defensively to begin with – we struggled to slow their ball down – but with the ball we were disappointing.

“We went from side to side, we didn’t move forward enough, our ruck was poor.

“We were altogether a different team in the second half.

“I felt we brought way more intensity to our carries, to how we attacked and that filtered into the rest of our game, and to keep an attack like theirs to zero for 40 minutes takes a bit of doing.

“We had to work really hard and I’m really pleased with the last 90 seconds – that’s my favourite part of the match to be honest because in lots of ways it didn’t matter.

“But it did matter and the fact that it mattered to the team on the field is a really good sign.”

An intercept try from Santi Carreras earned a narrow half-time lead for Gloucester, who had opened the scoring through Chris Harris before Rotimi Segun and Nick Tompkins hit back for Saracens.

The hosts then seized control with Theo Dan scoring twice off driving mauls before tries by Juan Martin Gonzalez and Jamie George sealed victory.

Gloucester head coach George Skivington said: “There’s no getting away from the fact the line-out faltered at some key moments.

“We were attacking pretty well but if you don’t win those key line-outs it’s very difficult to get in the game and I think we probably let that get on top of us a little bit.

“I don’t think our maul defence, as well, was good enough, we didn’t do our jobs well enough there.

“I’ve got to have a look at how we approached it during the week.

“Because it was a short week (after defeat at Bath) we probably didn’t do enough around that maul because we hadn’t conceded any maul tries in recent matches and obviously to concede a couple today is pretty painful, so a few set-piece issues was the big thing.

“We’ve got four guaranteed games now and obviously next week (at home to Exeter) is massive for us.”