The former England loose forward Steve Ojomoh – father of current Bath centre Max – once told me what it meant to play in a Bath-Gloucester derby. Few were better qualified to pass judgement. Having represented both sides and been a firm fan favourite, Ojomoh was (almost) uniquely positioned to comment on the niceties of an old-fashioned West Country dust up.
His answer was memorable. At Bath, he said, it was naturally a major honour to play for the club and to give Gloucester the fiercest of welcomes. But to play for Gloucester at Gloucester when Bath were in town was something else. “It felt like you were defending not just the rugby club but the city walls,” he said.
It sounded a bit like the siege of Troy. But all dispensed with Ojomoh’s warmth and chuckle.
Gloucester welcome Bath to Kingsholm this Saturday. Bath won’t have a Trojan Horse to bring inside the city walls. Nor will they have their own modern-day ‘Horse’ (the nickname bestowed upon winger Will Muir due to his distinctive gait), who is currently sidelined by a knee injury. But what they will have is Finn Russell’s copious box of tricks and a sense of wounded West Country pride after Saturday’s loss to (even closer geographical foes) Bristol.
Only 15 years ago, any talk of “the West Country derby” automatically made an English rugby fan think of Bath and Gloucester. Bristol were contriving to have some yo-yo-ing spells in the Championship, while Exeter had yet to begin their one-team re-drawing of the Premiership’s familiar contours.
In recent years, Johan van Graan has stabilised Bath and they have pulled away from a struggling Gloucester (Photo David Rogers/Getty Images)
But long gone are the days of Bath’s and Gloucester’s pre-eminence in these parts. Bristol and Exeter, especially the latter, have been far too good for that.
Yet, is there something afoot this term? Exeter have lost their opening three matches of the season and have been bamboozling even their own director of rugby. Bristol remain an inconsistent enigma – losing to Gloucester at home one week due to a harum-scarum gameplan, winning at Bath the next with a pre-half-time bonus point in the back pocket. The moment is perhaps ripe for a reassertion of West Country dominance by either Gloucester or Bath, both of whom have been without silverware for longer than either club’s fans would care to remember.
With the exception of the first 35 minutes of their season, Gloucester have looked proper contenders: keeping their cool and their style to squeak past the Bears in a thriller at Ashton Gate, and almost beating Sale in south Manchester.
The received wisdom on the eve of this season was that Bath were genuine title contenders. After two years of prudent and crafty ship-steadying by Johann van Graan and a valiant 14-man display in last year’s Premiership final, things augured well for Bath to add the capstone to their renaissance. Another strand of that received wisdom was that Gloucester remained very much a sleeping giant, and a giant showing precious few signs of fully shaking off its heavy-lidded slumber.
Yet what Gloucester have delivered so far this season has been pretty eye-popping at times. Entertaining? Certainly. Inspired? At times. Worth watching? You bet.
With the exception of the first 35 minutes of their season, Gloucester have looked proper contenders: keeping their cool and their style to squeak past the Bears in a thriller at Ashton Gate, and almost beating Sale in south Manchester. Their away form, suddenly, demands that they receive attention.
In the opening salvos of the season, Gloucester have impressed, with a thrilling win over Bristol a highlight (Photo David Rogers/Getty Images)
They may have lost up at the Sharks but scoring try-scoring bonus points in consecutive matches on the road says plenty about the new Gloucester attacking brio.
My RugbyPass colleague Jamie Lyall hit the nail on the head when commentating for TNT Sports on Friday night. Replacement scrum-half Caolan Englefield finished off a delicious team try after superb work down the right wing by the increasingly assured-looking Max Llewellyn.
“Another Gloucester banger!” declared Jamie, and you’d be mighty churlish to have disagreed. “They just don’t do the mundane. Forget the ordinary, this is the new Cherry and White strategy.”
Indeed it is. And the Premiership is a more exciting place for it. Using the full width of the pitch, Gloucester are striving to keep ball in hand, keep defences guessing, and playing at a lung-busting tempo. Instrumental in all of this is Tomos Williams, their new scrum-half and skipper. Williams’s tries against Sale were brilliant, but it was the guile, variety and dexterity of his overall performance which set the bar for Gloucester.
Bath were caught out on numerous occasions by Bristol’s quick thinking and quick tap-penalties. If Bath’s defence is similarly slow to re-form at Kingsholm, then Gloucester’s souped-up attack will prosper.
If the Cherry and Whites are to challenge Bath – and indeed if they are to challenge the play-off places this season – then they should seek to deploy the kind of high-tempo game-plan that saw them take the lead against the Sharks. It was a riotous opening up at Sale in which loop plays and well-timed passing served to rock the hosts back on their heels. One of Gloucester’s key gambits against Bath should be to play at similarly breakneck tempo. Bath were caught out on numerous occasions by Bristol’s quick thinking and quick tap-penalties. If Bath’s defence is similarly slow to re-form at Kingsholm, then Gloucester’s souped-up attack will prosper.
The Cherry and White’s basic attacking plan to undo Bath was drawn up in a Gloucestershire hotel last Thursday. Even though the game was a week-and-a-half away, director of rugby George Skivington pulled his coaches together and they shared their notes. “A provisional team” was selected, he tells me, “shaped around how we will attack Bath”.
This itself is telling. Gloucester’s approach this campaign is not primarily about containing other teams but about how they themselves will attack. It is a bold philosophy, and possibly a dangerous one should Russell, Ollie Lawrence and Co rock up with a taste for their own brand of attacking derring-do.
Bath were stunned by Bristol in a compelling West Country derby and will be desperate to storm Kingsholm (Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)
But Skivington is up for it. “In the modern day, Bath is the biggest one for this generation of Gloucester players and coaches’” he says. “It gets the hype, gets the biggest crowd, sells out the hospitality, and gets attention in the streets. In this building, the atmosphere will be massive.”
In keeping with a new spirit of boldness that appears to be penetrating Kingsholm, the Gloucester boss is rolling a few dice selection-wise this season, too. Some established lynchpins such as Ruan Ackermann and Lewis Ludlow may find they do not play as many minutes this season as they might have done in earlier years, while the likes of Llewellyn, Seb Atkinson and George Barton are the youngsters helping to deliver a double dose of audacity and dependability in the Gloucester backline.
“I’m having a lot of in-depth conversations with coaches and intimate conversations with players about selection,” admits Skivington. “I’ve been banging the drum about a lot of our young talent for some time and those boys are now men. They are the team now. They are a core we’ve got and we’re in a really good spot. I’ve had a few conversations with players about when they are in and when they are out and that makes my job a bit more difficult, but that’s what it’s about.”
Another thing that Gloucester-Bath matches are about is drama, and for drama you need characters. Thank goodness, then, for Finn Russell, who will arrive at Kingsholm this weekend ready for Act 2 of his blossoming relationship with that most discerning of rugby audiences: The Shed.
Russell is a player happy to bring his character to bear on the rugby field – a happy-go-lucky demeanour which makes him likeable to the neutral as well as to the long-standing Bath fan.
Last year, the Scotland fly-half endeared himself to the Gloucester terrace by giving them a cheery wave after slotting a kick. The reception he gets this time around will be intriguing, as will the way he handles a Bath backline which is high on talent but also, unfortunately, high on injuries.
Bath will have noticed just how much Sale profited from first-phase attack against Gloucester last weekend, and that will have Russell rubbing his hands in anticipation.
Russell is a player happy to bring his character to bear on the rugby field – a happy-go-lucky demeanour which makes him likeable to the neutral as well as to the long-standing Bath fan. Yet there is a steeliness to Bath under Johann van Graan so far this season, as though last season’s runners-up spot has sharpened an appetite which can only be satiated by outright triumph in the league.
George Skivington was under pressure last season but has started this campaign brightly (Photo by Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
“Emotion takes care of itself,” says van Graan, the Bath head of rugby. “It’s important to be emotionally up for every game. If we weren’t up for it against Leicester, for example, we would have been in for a hiding. But emotion can’t be your only driver. It’s like having balance in life more generally.
“There is what I call both the art and the science of coaching. You’ve got to go with your gut and what you feel. But you’ve got to pick your moments. Emotion only lasts you so long. Like Mike Tyson said, ‘Everyone’s got a plan until you get punched in the face’.”
Bath’s punch in the face arguably came in the form of Bristol’s impressive – and unexpected – victory over them at The Rec last weekend. And for the Blue, Black and Whites to concede four tries in an opening half at home shows that they are still vulnerable, for all the spine that van Graan and defence coach JP Ferreira have inserted over the past two years.
Yet one loss does not make a winter. Bath remain a potent side, and their squad list is one which many of van Graan’s counterparts must surely look upon with just a smidge of envy. And this is a team long in the making. After almost 15 years of ownership and many millions of pounds, Bath owner Bruce Craig has yet to see a return – either by way of trophies or pounds sterling.
What happens on Saturday will be a litmus test of how far both Bath and Gloucester have come in this tale of two cities, and how far they both have to go to be genuinely at the summit of English club rugby once again. Guards, stand by the city walls.
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