Gloucester coach Philippe Saint Andre believes his team will need to show a considerable improvement on today's West County derby victory over Bristol in order to try and realise their dream of being crowned Premiership champions.
Gloucester, despite seeing half-backs Simon Mannix and Elton Moncrieff sin-binned during the first half, fought back from a seven point deficit to triumph 29-23. It was their eighth successive league win in sequence stretching back three months, and keeps them top of the pile more than halfway through the Premiership campaign.
At times though, Gloucester made hard work of it, and Saint Andre said: "If we want to win the league, then we will have to play much better than that. I have seen this season that we are capable of producing better displays.
Today, we lost control during a 25 minute period, and that is always going to happen if you have players sent to the sin-bin."
"We will have to play a lot better when we go to Saracens next Tuesday, although today was a good pressure game and the players should have learnt a lot from it."
Bristol's boss Bob Dwyer was critical of his team's display after seeing them concede a Premiership double to Gloucester this term. "We just didn't play today and the only complaints we can seriously make are
about ourselves,'' he said. "We didn't do anything that was any good. Our kicking and decision making was poor, and didn't show a lot of thought. We performed way below the standards that we set for ourselves in what was a pretty even game. "We lacked the mental toughness in a match that we could have won, but at no stage did we threaten to reproduce the form that we showed against Dax in the European Shield last Sunday."