Following Gloucester’s narrow 34-31 triumph over Exeter Chiefs in their PREM Rugby encounter at Kingsholm on Sunday, Planet Rugby picks out five takeaways from the thrilling action.
The top line
Gloucester have been waiting all season for the performance Kingsholm got on Sunday, and when it arrived it carried the weight of everything that came before it. A side sitting almost at the base of a 10-team Premiership, with two league wins from 13, walked out into the spring sun and produced their most complete 80 minutes of the campaign against the team Rob Baxter had spent the entire week framing as their redemption mission.
The 79-17 smashing of April 2025, the Tony Rowe dressing-room intervention, the coaching changes, the careful rebuild; all of it pointed to a Chiefs side arriving at Kingsholm with a year’s worth of motivation and the play-off race on the line. Gloucester answered with five tries, a Test-class scrum, a number eight performance for the ages, and a defence that held its shape twice in the closing minutes when the redemption arc threatened to write itself anyway.
Nobody in English rugby deserves a day like this more than George Skivington, the most honest director of rugby in the league, who has spent a brutal season fronting up to bad results without throwing a single player or coach under the bus in public. The candour finally got repaid. Five tries from five different sources of authority; scrum-half, midfield, wing carry, number eight from the base, number eight from the maul, said everything about a side that didn’t just turn up but turned up everywhere at once.
Tomos Williams, the difference-maker
The simplest sentence to write about Gloucester this season has been: When Tomos Williams plays, they have a chance, and when he doesn’t, they don’t. Sunday confirmed it in primary colours. The Wales scrum-half had been absent for five weeks after a shoulder injury picked up in the 17th minute against Harlequins, and in his absence Gloucester lost 36-17 at home to Leicester and 53-12 away at Bristol, both featuring the catastrophic first-quarter capitulations that have defined the slow-start curse Skivington publicly admitted he could not solve. Williams returned.
The slow start curse vanished. After conceding a trademark first-minute Ross Vintcent try off a lost aerial duel and a Greg Fisilau offload, Gloucester were level inside 10 minutes through Max Llewellyn, ahead by 22 through a Williams snipe of pure scrum-half intelligence between the two ruck pillars off the back of decoy runners pulling defenders out of position and never trailed again. The lineout-out captain who is leaving for Saracens in the summer ran the entire show; tempo, distribution, game management, and the kind of read on the ruck that only the best nines in the world possess. The British & Irish Lions star is the 2024-25 Premiership Player of the Season for a reason. Saracens have a serious upgrade arriving in June.
The Boyd fingerprints
Chris Boyd has been Gloucester’s technical director on a consultancy basis since 1 March, with Skivington reverting to a pure head-coach role and reporting to him. The man who built the 2016 Hurricanes Super Rugby title and turned Northampton Saints into a Premiership force arrived at Kingsholm in person in April. Sunday was, in effect, the first home performance in which his hands-on time with the squad has had room to show. It showed.
The pace, the geometry of the passing, the runners around the ruck pulling defenders to clear space for the snipe, the trademark passing in front of the receiver to force the catch on the move, all of it had Saints fingerprints on it for anyone who watched Northampton in the late teens. The system isn’t fully installed yet, that will take a pre-season, but the architecture is visible.
Two tries in two minutes around the 24th minute, born of phase tempo and width, told a story Gloucester have not been able to tell since September. The honest verdict, is that this is how Gloucester should be playing week in week out, not once every 15 games. The harder verdict is that they hope they probably will be, by August.
The Gloucester scrum and the Val Rapava-Ruskin enigma
The scrum was the engine that drove everything in Cherry and White. Val Rapava-Ruskin and Afolabi Fasogbon gave Josh Iosefa-Scott and the Exeter front-row a torrid afternoon, with Jamie George in the commentary box noting that Gloucester were holding the contest longer and that Exeter were moving around as a result and conceding free-kicks. When Baxter changed his entire front row at half-time to stem the bleeding, the first scrum of the second half melted them. The next vaporised them. Rapava-Ruskin was leading the drive, solid, legal, technically immaculate, and the maul that produced Will Trenholm’s second try, the score that effectively closed the game, started from a scrum free-kick.
The set-piece dominance converted directly to seven points, and the entire territorial control of the second half flowed from the same source. Which makes Rapava-Ruskin the biggest enigma in English rugby. He should have 80 caps. The talent on display on Sunday was Test-class loosehead play of a quality England have not had access to for some time. The reasons it has not translated to a senior cap haul are injury and personality, and the day told both halves of the verdict in real time; a career-best 70 minutes followed by a forced exit through a nasty collision, a return that lasted one phase before he conceded a penalty for clearly going around the corner, and a mood after the late farce that nobody in the stadium would have wanted to be near. The cap haul stays where it is but at Kingholm, where props are serious currency, Val is loved.
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Trenholm’s day
Trenholm had not scored for Harlequins, his first club, or Gloucester before Sunday. He left the field with two tries, 17 tackles, 22 carries, 60 metres made, eight defenders beaten, two breakdown turnovers including the match-saving jackal in the closing minutes after Manny Feyi-Waboso had broken almost the length of the field, and a recovered loose ball off Fisilau in the first half.
That is a complete number eight shift of the kind that gets a 25-year-old summer signing onto a national radar he was not previously on. The first try came from a five-metre maul drive of pure power. The second came from the same source, off the back of the Rapava-Ruskin scrum free-kick that delivered the territory. The carries broke the gain-line repeatedly. The tackles held the defensive shape when Gloucester were down to 14 and reeling. The jackal at 38 minutes shut down a 14-phase Exeter assault. The jackal in the 78th minute saved the game. He was the Player of the Match in the eye-test and in the data, and there is no debate about either.
Lewis Ludlow, the 11-year club stalwart and former captain, deserves a mention for the breakdown work that held the back-row together around him; the beating heart of the club, in Skivington’s own description of him earlier this season. But Trenholm’s afternoon was the headline as he delivered a career-defining performance, and a properly thrilling glimpse of what the back row could become.