Trophies. They are like bloody buses. Or at least that is what Bath fans must be hoping. They wait 17 years for one, and along come …
We are about to find out how many. One has just been. The Premiership Cup pulled up in March to fairly inconsequential fanfare. But it looks as if another, the Challenge Cup, is waiting just a stop away, before we turn our attention to a third, the Premiership, timetabled for the middle of June – but you know what these bloody buses are like.
Bath journey to Cardiff on Friday in an attempt to catch the next one. They qualified for the Challenge Cup by being jettisoned from the Champions, but they have fairly blitzed their way to the final, where they will meet Lyon.
The last trophy Bath won, before the reserves triumphed in March, is, as it happens, the Challenge Cup, all those 17 years ago, when they beat Worcester in the 2008 final in a downpour at Kingsholm on a Sunday afternoon. That, in turn, was the first piece of silverware the club had won in 10 years, since they became champions of Europe in 1998, at the tail end of an era in which those buses came regularly and on cue.
No one can move very far in rugby these days without someone mentioning the phrase “this club’s DNA”, but in the case of Bath the double helix is shot through with the legacy of glory. Even if one has to have been born in the 80s to have any chance of remembering it, the echoes of those years when Bath were the champions of everything in English rugby ring throughout the old walls of Aquae Sulis. What must that do to a club, as they wander all but trophy-less in the years to follow.
Sam Underhill was born a few months after Bath’s last English title, in 1996, the year they also won the cup, back when it was rugby’s equivalent of the FA Cup, rather than the squad-building exercise during the Six Nations it is now. It was Bath’s 10th cup in 13 years, their sixth title in eight, their fourth double. Underhill has endured with the others the barren years, since he joined in 2017, but he senses a shift in the current squad’s approach, wrought by Johann van Graan, Bath’s South African director of rugby over the past three seasons. Van Graan believes in “the process”, not the result – the bus ride, if you like, over the destination.
“You’re not doing things because it’s the right moment to do them,” says Underhill. “You’re doing them because it’s the right thing to do. It becomes a sort of self-fulfilling cycle.”
Certainly, any focus on results in the past few decades would have brought Bath little but anguish, all the more so given that pedigree. So maybe this focus on process is all for the better. The season before Van Graan took over, Bath finished bottom of the Premiership, shipping 70 points at home to Saracens in October and losing 64-0 at Gloucester six months later. A nadir, even by recent standards.
Since then, the journey has been steadily upwards – mid-table in Van Graan’s first season and runners-up last year, his second, when an early red card in the final did its best to corrupt those processes. A good time to put the contingency of outcomes to the back of one’s mind.
When Bath won at Pau in the round of 16, Underhill was sent off himself, early in the second half, by Hollie Davidson. She will be officiating again on Friday, the first woman to referee a European cup final and the first Scot since Jim Fleming took the whistle in, you guessed it, 1998, when Bath beat Brive to become European champions. Red cards are never far away in rugby these days, but the philosophy of Van Graan inures his players to such accidents of fate. “I don’t put too much stock into how things go,” says Underhill. “If you worry too much about the outcome, you end up trying to catch smoke. You just chase it, chase it, and the more you try, the further away you get.”
For those less focused on process, a casual glance at the English and French tables might suggest a happy outcome for Bath on Friday night. Lyon languish in the lower reaches of the Top 14, after three consecutive defeats; Bath have top spot in the Premiership regular season sewn up already. But such is the Zen at the Rec, hankering after anything so vulgar as results is off limits. And the fans are onside – even those old enough to remember you know when.
“You want to give people good experiences,” says Underhill. “And that doesn’t always mean winning trophies. It goes back to not worrying so much about outcomes. It’s not quite as straightforward as the fans will be happy if we win trophies and incredibly upset if we don’t. Hopefully, there’s a level of appreciation in the process and the people.”
Stop looking and you will find it, seems to be the gist of it. Buses never stop when you run after them, as Bath know only too well.
