The first thing anyone who cares says when they find out you’re a sports journalist is to ask whether or not you were at whichever big game was on that weekend. The second, after you’ve explained, apologetically, that you don’t actually follow football, is usually an awkward pause. There are all sorts of reasons why you may prefer any other sort of sport, but after 20 years of variations on this conversation, I’ve learned that unless you want to come across like someone who insists actually they prefer art-house cinema and free jazz, it’s best to have a straightforward explanation. Mine is that I grew up in Bath.
They do play football in Bath, out at Twerton Park. The club have never been in the Football League (right now they’re in National League South), and most weeks they draw a crowd of around a thousand. Which isn’t so very many more than you’ll find crowded around the stone balustrades of the city’s parade gardens, trying to peer across the weir and see into the Rec when the rugby club have a home game. Bath’s football has always been bad. But in the 80s and 90s Bath’s rugby was so good that the brand still stands for something, even after they have been mediocre for a large part of the past 30 years.
It was Jack Rowell’s team and, after Rowell took the England job, Brian Ashton’s. It was the team of Gareth Chilcott, Victor Ubogu and Graham Dawe, of Andy Robinson, Nigel Redman, John Hall and Martin Haag, of Stuart Barnes, Tony Swift, David Trick, Mike Catt, Jon Callard, Richard Hill, Simon Halliday, Phil de Glanville and Jeremy Guscott, and too many more to name them all. It was the team that won the league six times in eight years and the cup 10 times in 12, and the team who beat Brive, by a point, in the European Cup final in 1998. Which, looking back on it now, was the club’s high-water mark. The place where the wave broke.
They were already losing their way. They had made a series of bizarrely extravagant signings, agreed to an embarrassing cross-code challenge against Wigan Warriors, in which they got battered 82-6 playing rugby league at Maine Road, and an excruciating six-part behind-the-scenes documentary on the BBC which began with Hall, who had now taken over as director of rugby, promising to “build the most formidable club in Europe”, the “Manchester United and Liverpool of rugby” and ended, a few weeks later, with Hall being told he was being “let go” by his old teammate Swift, who was now the club’s chief executive.
All of which is water under Pulteney Bridge. Bath’s advantage in those years was that Rowell turned them into something like a professional team while everyone else was playing an amateur game. Once other clubs caught up, Bath slipped back into the middle of the league. They have grown-up fans who before this season have only ever known them as underachievers, with a solitary victory in the European Challenge Cup in 2008. You will run out of fingers before you finish listing all the coaches who have had a crack at getting them back where they belonged in the years since.
Over time, you would hear whispers that players had started to see it as a comfy billet, a place where they would be well paid and have a nice life doing it, especially after the owner, Bruce Craig, built them a new training facility on the grounds of Farleigh House.
Whatever else they used to say about Bath back in the day, it never was that they were soft. Johann van Graan has got a lot right since he became their latest director of rugby, not least his recent remarks on the BBC that he felt the club “didn’t understand who they were” when he joined them. The city around it is different too. Ken Loach (who is one of those 1,000 or so Bathonians who prefer Twerton Park)complains it has become too clean, too sharp, too geared towards the day trippers visiting the city for their weekend shopping.
Bath,Loach says, has always been a city of two halves. It is surrounded by farming communities and former coalmining towns, and is rough enough in the bits the tourists don’t go. At their best, the rugby team have always combined both of them. Craig’s money has done a lot of the work, no doubt about it, it paid for Finn Russell, among others. Russell, as a marquee player, is exempt from their salary cap, but to be honest the club’s economics still feel a bit of a mystery. Somehow they have found the money to bring in Santiago Carreras and Henry Arundell next season. But they have a lot of academy players coming up through the squad too, some nicked from elsewhere but a lot of them locals, from Beechen Cliff state school up top of one of the seven hills overlooking the city.
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Pat Lam is right,the tickets are too expensive. And the Rec is still a ramshackle old place. The club have been arguing with obstinate locals about whether or not they can redevelop it for almost as long as anyone can remember, and will go on arguing about it well into the future. The latest complaint is that their plans could interfere with an old copper beech tree nearby. But the team are winning again; they have an ugly pack, backs worth paying to watch and a handful of local lads in the thick of it. This weekend their supporters will be making the trip to Twickenham for the big match against their old enemy, Leicester. Things change, but this, at least, finally feels like it is staying the same.