As Bath confine their errors to the pitch these days, CIARÁN CRONINsays the great amateurs of the English game finally seem to be turning professional
‘Class A, it’s okay, everybody’s doing it,” were the words that came from Justin Harrison’s mouth on May 10th, 2009. The Australian secondrow was standing at the front of a bus filled with his Bath team-mates, microphone in hand, playing the role of a flight attendant as they set out from the beautiful Georgian town to London on an end-of-season jolly.
Apparently, the “Class A” comment was meant as a joke, an ironic reference to the fact that, five months earlier, Harrison’s former Bath team-mate Matt Stevens was found with cocaine in his system and banned from the game for two years.
That was, according to Harrison and others in the squad, how Bath’s players choose to deal with the news. Anytime somebody in the squad was called for a post-match drugs test post the ban, the rest of the dressingroom would gasp with feigned concern and proclaim that the player in question was done for. Whatever the context of Harrison’s comments, however, the events of May 10th would go on to make them appear entirely more sinister.
It was a day, looking back on it, that laid bare, arguably for the first time, the problems that exist within English professional rugby culture, the remnants of which, as Martin Johnson well knows, still linger.
Having drunk steadily on the 97-mile trip between Bath and London, the Bath squad frequented the Church, a largely antipodean gathering which throws logic on its head by playing the role of a nightclub that happens to open its doors at midday.
Between the squad’s arrival in London and their return to Bath at 11pm that night, the club’s players managed to get through as much debauchery as your average male would do well to get through in a decade.
The highlights, if that is not an oxymoron, saw hooker Rob Dawkins admitted to accident and emergency at St Thomas’s Hospital having drunk too much, a fight break out with members of a Harlequins squad on their own end-of-season night out and, according to his own testimony, Harrison snorting cocaine in the toilets of a Shepherd’s Bush pub.
And that was only the bits that definitely emerged from the trip to London.
After one player, a whistleblower whose identity was protected by the RFU during their disciplinary procedures, told the Bath management about what had gone on during their sojourn in London, an investigation was launched.
Certain players were asked to undertake drugs tests a couple of days after the trip and three of them, co-captains Michael Lipman and Alex Crockett, as well as winger Andrew Higgins, refused to do so. Hours before they were due to sit before a club disciplinary panel, the trio quit the club and that August, the RFU found all three guilty of “conduct prejudicial to the interests of the game” and handed them bans lasting nine months.
Harrison had resigned from the club earlier in the summer, having admitted taking cocaine, and was given an eight-month ban under the same charge. Throw in Stevens and his two-year ban and by the start of the 2009/10 season, Bath were down five key players from the previous year.
Where, as a club, do you go from there? In truth, as they prepare to welcome Leinster to the Recreation Grounds in the Heineken Cup tomorrow, Bath Rugby Club are still finding their way.
Of the 22-man squad who lost in the Premiership semi-final against Leicester the day before their adventures in London in May 1999, only five players – Nick Abendanon, Matt Banahan, Michael Claassens, David Flatman and Stuart Hooper – are in contention to play a part tomorrow.
Steve Meehan, director of rugby at the time, is no longer at the club and neither is Andrew Brownsword, the then owner. Brownsword was said to have been furious at what occurred at Bath that season and while it was not the chief motivation behind his move to sell the club in April 2010 to Bruce Craig, a pharmaceuticals millionaire from the region, it surely couldn’t have made him desperate to cling on to the club he had pumped money into for the previous 10 years.
So, from the ashes of disgrace and embarrassment has come a new beginning.
And a badly needed one too for a club used to being successful. In the four years before the game turned professional between 1991 and 1994, with the likes of Jeremy Guscott, Stuart Barnes, Tony Swift and Gareth Chilcott to the fore, Bath won four Premiership titles on the trot.
Nobody could touch them. They also won the competition in 1996, a period when the best amateur clubs still held sway. But since winning the European Cup in 1998, Bath haven’t won a tournament of any significance.
They’re not likely to this season, either, but the introspection that came about following the events of May 2009 seems to have engendered a new attitude.
For starters, at the outset of the 2009/10 season, prop David Flatman was willing to admit the players needed to change their own culture. “We were becoming a bit of a party club,” he said. “I don’t think there was a drugs culture here but there was more we could have done to address the apparent slide of our reputation. We are the ones who feel responsible.”
Not that it was all the fault of the club’s players. The environment that surrounds a rugby club can play a major part its culture and Bath’s wasn’t up to scratch. For example, before Craig arrived as owner, the club trained in Lambridge, close to the city centre. The location suited many, sure, but players were forced to change in what were effectively portacabins and had to do gym work in other locations. The moment Craig took control, he purchased a 99-year lease on Farleigh House, a country estate located 10 miles outside the city. The club now train at the location and its entire administrative operation is operated from there.
When all facilities are eventually completed – the plan is to turn the Old Chapel into a gym, the Long Barn into dressingroom facilities – it will undoubtedly represent the most picturesque training ground in European rugby, and probably the best too. All of which fits in to Craig’s ambitious plans for the club.
“Bath was probably the best club in the amateur era but in the professional era, we haven’t succeeded in the way we could have done,” he said on taking charge. “If you look at Toulouse, Munster, Leinster and Perpignan, there is a passion, fervour and a willingness on the pitch to almost die for the shirt. You can’t bring in journeymen to do that. That’s one of the things we’re working on – chemistry is very important.”
The journeymen have been replaced by academy graduates. Of the 23-man squad who lost narrowly to Sale in the Aviva Premiership last weekend, seven had come through the ranks at the club.
With Ian McGeechan’s trusted hand on the tiller, there is now a definite plan at place in the club. On his arrival, Craig stated that his first season, 20010/11, would be about “assessment and change”, his second, this current season, about “transition and settling”, and his third, 2012/13, would be about concentrating on “success with stability”.
Craig did prefix that last ambition with the word “hopefully”, which is just as well, because as things stand, this current season looks well and truly transitional in nature. Bath sit 10th in the Premiership, with four wins and six defeats from 10 games, and they’re already playing catch-up in the Heineken Cup following a defeat away to Glasgow in the first round of fixtures. As a result, there is some pressure on McGeechan’s men heading into Sunday’s game.
“Everything is in place for us to play the game we want to play and it’s down to us as players to cut out the errors that are costing us at the moment,” says Nick Abendanon, one of the handful of survivors from that tarnished season two and a half years back. “If we tidy up those areas, we won’t have a problem in climbing the table. Our game plan is fine and our attacking style is fine but we need to stop those individual errors.”
Still, at least Bath’s players are making their errors on the pitch these days. Class A is no longer okay, and neither are a lot of other things it would appear.
The great amateurs of the English game finally seem to be turning professional.
THE BATH FIVE: WHERE THEY ARE NOW
Michael Lipman
After serving his ban, Lipman, who grew up in Australia, lined out for club side Warringah back home and earned a contract with the Melbourne Rebels in the Super 15.
Alex Crockett
The centre, now 30, signed for Bristol once he had served his nine-month ban. In June of this year, he signed for Worcester on a two-year contract but is set to miss the rest of this season after injuring his anterior cruciate ligament while playing in the LV=Cup against Bath.
Andrew Higgins
Having initially announced his intention to retire from the game following his nine-month ban, the winger changed his mind and signed for the Exeter Chiefs once he was free to return. He has since moved to Sale.
Justin Harrison
Harrison retired from playing after quitting Bath, and following a spell coaching with the Brumbies, he is now assisting Matt Williams at Narbonne in French rugby’s second tier.
Matt Stevens
During his two years out of the game, Stevens ran a coffee shop in Bath.
He joined Saracens once his ban was completed in January 2011 and has returned to the England set-up.
