Sam Burgess may have few regrets about his abrupt return to rugby league but back in Bath they are still fuming. Discovering a popular colleague never really enjoyed union and could not face the prospect of spending the next 18 months playing club rugby with them has upset many of his former team-mates, several of whom feel badly let down.
Burgess’s sponsored farewell column in the Daily Mail has merely hardened the mood at the squad’s grandiose headquarters at Farleigh Hungerford, where his ambivalence towards the club who brought him to union has prompted widespread dismay. For England team-mates such as George Ford, who played alongside him and worked hard to help integrate the cross-code arrival, it has been an unnecessary kick in the nether regions.
So strong is the feeling within the Bath dressing room that the club captain, Stuart Hooper, advised Burgess it would not be a good idea for him to come in and say his farewells at the end of last week. Ford, for one, did not pull his punches on Tuesday, describing himself as “massively disappointed” Burgess had not fulfilled the remainder of his three-year contract regardless of whether or not he featured for England.
“Everyone knows he was a world-class rugby league player but I thought he was a guy who was going to have a go and stick it out,” Ford said. “He played in the World Cup and I thought he was going to come back to the club, get his head down and play at the back-row here and become a world-class player. As players we expected him to stay here, but he’s not.
“He signed a three-year deal and, when you do that, I think you know what you are doing. If you commit to the club, you commit to that set of players, the staff and the fans. He committed for three years but he’s gone after a year and a bit. There’s lads here who would die for the club … they sacrificed a lot for Sam when he came over and put time and effort into making him the player he was at the back end of last year when he was named in that World Cup squad.
“To become a world-class player in rugby union, you’ve got to put in the hard graft and it does take time. It doesn’t come overnight. It’s just whether you want to do it or not. I feel for the lads … It is disappointing and it’s left a big hole in our back row.”
Among Burgess’s parting shots was to suggest his critics had an agenda against him from the start and were actively keen for him to fail. “It was a losing battle from day one … it’s almost like they don’t want anyone else to do well in the jersey,” he said. “That’s definitely the feeling I got in rugby union.”
That hardly squares with the consistent support Bath say he received and whose director of rugby, Mike Ford, continues to be deeply unimpressed. “All I know is he didn’t have the stomach to see out his contract,” he said. “This was the time to roll his sleeves up and become the player I thought he could be. He chose not to.”
Ford also disclosed he had debated with Stuart Lancaster the wisdom of picking Burgess as a centre for England, given his lack of explosive pace and inexperience in union. “He asked me my opinion on Sam and whether I’d pick him. I said: ‘Yes, as a 6 but we play differently to England.’ At international level you need a lineout forward at 6 and someone who knows the intricacies of the position.”
It is even understood Burgess found participating in last season’s Premiership final underwhelming compared with his NRL experiences, and it is now clear he was eyeing a return to South Sydney long before the World Cup started.
By the time Ford Sr spoke to him for the final time last week there was no chance of a U-turn. “You don’t know what he was thinking,” Ford said. “I spoke to him about what a fantastic player he could be, the investment the club had put into him and the fact that it was time to repay that but he chose differently.”
Burgess may have gone but the ill feeling generated by his premature exit will linger for a while.
