Skivington 'absolutely' has Gloucester backing

Gloucester director of rugby George Skivington "absolutely" has the backing of the club's hierarchy, says chief executive officer Alex Brown.

The Cherry and Whites fell to a record-breaking 90-0 defeat by Northampton Saints in the Premiership on Saturday, with a much-changed fledgling side ceding 14 tries to the league leaders.

The loss was the club's 13th in the league this season and comes two weeks before they take on Sharks in the European Challenge Cup final.

"It’s never as simple as 'change will fix things', I think we’ve got to look at it as a whole and we will do that over the summer," Brown told BBC Radio Gloucestershire.

"We’ve got a busy two weeks - we’ve got to get this European final right.

"We’re going to have a review but, going into next season, George is under contract and I’m not going to talk about suggestions on anything [to do] with his employment."

While Gloucester are in the running to end the season with two trophies - having won the Premiership Rugby Cup in March - they are going to finish the Premiership second from bottom in the table for the third time in the past four campaigns, since Skivington took over in June 2020.

The 41-year-old signed a "long-term deal" in May 2022.

"I can say that George is an excellent coach and the group around him, the coaching staff, are also equally excellent," Brown said.

"We have a job to do to make sure there is a pride within the shirt. I don’t think we saw some of those bits on the weekend and we’ve got to address that for sure."

Former lock Brown made more than 200 appearances for Gloucester as a player and has worked in various capacities within the club over the past 10 years since retiring on the field.

He accepted criticism that the loss was "embarrassing", apologising to fans - particularly those who travelled to Franklin's Gardens - and accepting that the club's Premiership performances have not been good enough.

Gloucester have won 11 Premiership games out of 37 across the past two campaigns.

"Premiership is number one and I don’t think anyone can hide behind that - we’ve not performed there and we need to address that," Brown said.

However, Brown dismissed criticism that Gloucester had damaged the integrity of the competition by rotating their squad in recent games and fielding such an inexperienced side against Northampton.

"Over the course of the season I think we’ve been very competitive," he said, pointing to one-point and two-point losses to Exeter and Northampton respectively earlier in the season.

"We’ve prioritised what we need to prioritise and that’s important. We’ve got a raft of injuries and we can’t put out our senior team every week because they can’t manage the load."

Brown did admit Gloucester's strength in depth is an issue, although he fell short of saying the club was financially hamstrung.

"We're trying to run the club sustainably and that does come with its challenges," Brown added.

"The first 15 on paper are a competing team - the team underneath that, we need to address that and look at that over the course of the off-season and see if we can improve that.

"We just need to get more out of the team within the constraints we’ve got."