Bristol Bears made it back-to-back wins at Sandy Park with a 20-7 victory over Exeter Chiefs on Saturday night in which they displayed all the attributes needed to a championship winning side.
Bristol played with a control, physical intensity and togetherness which delighted their proud director of rugby Pat Lam.
In rugby's unofficial 'European Super Cup' match, with the winners of the Heineken Champions Cup - Exeter Chiefs - vs the winners of the Challenge Cup - Bristol Bears - it was Pat Lam's side who in the end comfortably came out on top, with tries from man of the match Harry Randall and Fijian national captain Semi Radradra, along with 10 points from the boot of fly-half Callum Sheedy.
Exeter were not at their dominant best, but much of that was due to the physical challenge a fired up Bristol presented.
Chiefs lock Jonny Hill scored a try before the break to see the sides go in tied at 7-7 after a fierce opening 40 minutes, but Bristol wrestled control of the game in the second half to not concede another point and claim the victory and replace Exeter at the summit of the league table.
Lam reflected: “It’s a big win for the club.
"Coming here, we were going to get a taste of them being at their best after their loss to Wasps, so we prepared accordingly.
“We talked about what it takes at Test match level, the intensity and physicality. You can’t just rock up with those things, you have got to prepare the whole week.
"You have to give Exeter respect for who they are and what they have done, but it was a massive effort by everybody today and those guys out there represent the efforts of the whole club."
Lam named the strongest starting side of his three and half year reign as Bristol boss for the trip to the 2019/20 double winners, with nine internationals in the starting side, and they delivered with the likes of former All Black Charles Piutau making two clean breaks and beating six defenders to make 106m in attack.
Lam said: "I thought all our big players stepped up and showed why they are international class, all our international boys out there and that was good to see.
“There is a long way to go, but it’s more the way we are playing rugby at the moment.
"Not many people talk about Bristol playing that type of [controlled] rugby but we pride ourselves that we do.
"The boys ground it out. We spoke about half time about having control of the game and just keep coming at them, win all the little battles every minute and the boys did that.
“People admire all the fancy stuff, but statistically, we have the best maul, for instance. No-one has scored a maul try against us and that is a real credit to the boys and the coaches like John Muldoon who came up with the line out move for Harry Randall's try.
“They came at us hard, but we hit them hard, and that’s what we planned to do.”
