WASPS fans will be hoping that things really do come in threes when they take on Gloucester at Twickenham tomorrow.

More than 30,000 tickets have been sold for The Stinger but the numbers that will matter most to Dai Young and his team will be those in the points column.

With a brand, spanking new European competition now dangling in front of both clubs, an end-of-season dead rubber now has an awful lot resting on it.

It’s hard to see the losers picking themselves up again to snatch back seventh spot, and Young himself has described the game as ‘an eight-pointer’.

He said: “There are mathematical and realistic options. From our point of view if we lost at the weekend it would be extremely difficult to get in the top seven.

“The same is true for Newcastle when we play them.

“To give ourselves a chance, we need to win against Gloucester and win against Newcastle. If we can’t win those games then we don’t really deserve to be there.

“We might need to go to Northampton and get something too, but I’d be very surprised if we’re still in it in the last game if we don’t pick up those two wins.”

Wasps do have history on their side.

They won 32-30 at Kingsholm earlier in the season and a fortnight ago knocked the Cherry and Whites out of the Amlin Challenge Cup with a 36-24 home win in the quarter-finals, when Wasps were better than their 12-point winning margin.

Young said: “I think that game makes things a lot tougher for us. The messages coming out of their camp is that they were embarrassed by that loss and performance.

“I thought it was more a case of us playing well. I thought they caught us on a good day.

“But they’re going to come fired up and determined to put the record straight, and we know they’re a quality team even if things haven’t gone their way in the last few weeks.”

Wasps by contrast are playing well again, and defeats to Saracens and Leicester shouldn’t mask that revival.

Young said: “We’ve stepped up in performance. We went through a patch where things weren’t going well and we were a shadow of the team we’d been at the beginning of the season.

“But we’ve put some decent performances together and looked far more threatening with ball in hand.

“If we can patch up some of the things that keep on hurting us – restarts, ball retention, individual errors – I think we’ll have more than enough.”