Maybe not the biggest brawl in the history of the Premier League, but it was the kind of non-competition to give a competition a bad name. There was something disheartening about the inevitability of what was happening, albeit enlivened by a couple of quick-fire hat-tricks, each collected in less than a quarter of an hour.

Tom Parton made Premiership history with his hat-trick, the third scoring 25 seconds in the 21st Minute, breaking David Strettle’s record for the first hat-trick 11 years ago, also for Saracens. That made it 32-0 on the hour as Josh Hathaway scored his first hat-trick for Gloucester. He got his back in 13 minutes, which was even faster than Parton, who scored his in 15. If only the last hour had not happened, the record would have been his.

So Saracens are keeping the heat on at the top of the table like we knew they would. Gloucester, who scored at the gone again, Seb Blake’s, managed to get out with a bonus point, not that it would do them much good. They are too far away to worry about the queue of teams looking for a playoff spot. Their thoughts are turned to the Walking Cup, where 11 changes are being made to the team that smack Fischbugler last Friday to qualify for the semi-finals.

There is a lot of discussion about how regular it seems to be in European competition, about teams fielding underperforming teams. On the other hand, we can’t complain about the fact that the players are being whipped one Minute, then the next about the teams resting the players. So fair enough, Gloucester, your prerogative.

However, this did not make the result any less inevitable. Saracens were a mixed bag throughout. At times their game seemed effortless, Alex Goode pulling the strings at the back as masterfully as ever. But the way they conceded those four attempts in the last quarter, three of them in the last 10 minutes, has to be correct.

“Five points were really important today,” Mark McCall said. “From a performance point of view, it was mixed. We’ve been like that for most of the season. There is a glimpse of what we can do, but there is also a big gap in the middle of us at our best and us at our worst. We just have to figure out how not to be superior during the games anymore.”

Parton’s first two attempts were almost exact replicas of each other; a Saracen actioning line followed by gentle hands from Owen Farrell and Goode for a simple attempt in the corner. His third came from another rude line-up, this time Aled Davies broke blindly to line it up.

At this point, there was a sense of duck-striking over the procedure. All Parton’s attempts seemed too easy. But George Skivington kept a cool head in the locker room at halftime. He had chosen a young team that was being punished for its enthusiasm as much as everything else.

“We inflicted three or four penalties for offside, which I think was a group of young guys who tried to jump the gun a little bit,” he said. “There was no hair dryer treatment. I respect the team I brought in and the team Saracens deployed. It would be wrong if I sprayed them at half-time because of the Position we were in.”