Bath 3 Toulouse 3:EVERYTHING IS relative and, given the events of the past week, the mud-covered men of Bath were grateful for small mercies last night. Not only did no one drown in a sea of liquid ooze, but they can look forward to a Heineken Cup quarter-final, having finished on top of a relentlessly competitive pool. If the prospect of an away tie in Leicester, thanks to an inferior try count, is less than ideal, it is something to cling to amid the toxic fall-out of Matt Stevens' failed drug test.
Nor can it truthfully be said that Stevens’ absence made a tremendous difference in conditions better suited to a rubber-clad Jacques Cousteau than a prop who favours harder, faster ground. If the lowest-scoring Heineken Cup game of all time (and there have been 971 of them) proved anything, it was that teams often gain from adversity.
“Things like this do stick in the back of people’s minds,” said Bath’s director of rugby Steve Meehan, before confirming that the Stevens case had hit some squad members “like a sledgehammer”. The sight of several raised Bath arms at the final whistle was a clear indication that in the circumstances, the home side felt they had done a very creditable job, not least the replacement prop David Flatman, who bolstered a shaky home scrummage in the second half.
A storm of freezing hailstones swept across the city before kick-off, forcing those in the open temporary stand to seek cover and making the pitch resemble a sponge sprinkled with icing sugar. Then the real downpour started, reducing the playing surface to a mixture of swamp and skidpan.
Apres le deluge, almost inevitably, it boiled down to character and goal-kicking nerve. The scrum-half Byron Kelleher and number eight Shaun Sowerby were outstanding for Toulouse but in contrast to Bath’s Butch James, who managed one successful kick from two attempts, the unfortunate Jean-Baptiste Elissalde found the posts as easy to locate as a fancy bistro in Melksham.
He missed five of six penalty efforts, one from bang in front. Had he nailed even one of them it would have relegated Bath to an away tie against the unbeaten Cardiff Blues, a prospect which Toulouse must now contemplate.
It is the first time since the competition’s inception in 1995 that no French side has made a home draw in the quarter-finals.
Wasps’ defeat in Castres earlier in the afternoon guaranteed that both teams would qualify for the latter stages. Bath suffered a significant loss when their captain, Michael Lipman, was knocked out in the 17th minute, by a sickening clash of heads with one of his team-mates, Matt Banahan. After a five-minute delay the flanker had revived sufficiently to walk to the dressingrooms for treatment to a gashed head.
BATH: Abendanon; Maddock, Crockett, Berne, Banahan; James, Claassens; Barnes (Flatman, h-t), Mears (Dixon, 66), Bell, Harrison, Hooper, Beattie, Lipman (capt; Scaysbrook, 17), Browne (Faamatuainu, 72).
TOULOUSE: Poitrenaud (Clerc, 72); Medard, Fritz (Ahotaeiloa, 39), Jauzion (capt), Heymans; Elissalde (Du Toit, 63), Kelleher; Human, Servat (Vernet-Basualdo, 66), Lecouls (Perugini, 72), Pelous (Lambouley, 72), Albacete, Bouilhou (Nyanga, 53), Dusautoir, Sowerby.
Referee: A Rolland (Ireland).
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/YVIRIOZQ35EWRPZXR27KGMO6YU.png)