If, in times of crisis, everyone looks to the most experienced of their number, all eyes at Bath these days are turning to Matt Banahan. This is his 10th season at the club; he recently racked up his 200th appearance; and it just so happens this is no crisis as far as the wing is concerned. “I’ve been in worse positions than this,” he says. “We’ve been in 11th place at Christmas before and ended up in fourth.”
That is a reference to their awful start to the 2009-10 campaign, when they won one of out of 10 Premiership games. Then Christmas came, and Bath won 11 of their remaining 12 to end up in the play-offs. By that standard, their present tally, which they will take into Christmas, of two wins from six for ninth place seems really quite respectable.
Banahan says: “We’re losing games within a score. The last two games were close, then the game before that was Leinster [in Europe] and we put on a performance against a team that had 13 internationals. We’re only really talking about the last two weeks.”
Conceding 38 points at home to Harlequins, as Bath did on the day of the World Cup final, may also elicit a little conversation, but it is true you do not need to be playing particularly badly to suffer in the Premiership just now. After the horrors of the World Cup, English rugby is emboldening itself with a vigorous show of strength from its clubs, on and off the field.
Bath have contributed in the latter department with the signing of Taulupe Faletau this week. In the former, they are not firing as they were on their run to the Premiership final last season, during which Banahan became the first player to score a hat-trick in the play-offs.
The vagaries of the scrum are exercising Bath’s attention at the moment. Against Leinster, their only game in Europe so far this season, they won on the back of 10 points earned directly from that set piece. Against Northampton, they lost, conceding six points from it. Mike Ford, Bath’s director of rugby, was seething and complained about the disproportionate influence of referees “guessing at scrum time”. He and Neal Hatley, his assistant coach and a revered member of the front-row union, visited Tony Spreadbury, the referees’ chief at the RFU, to seek clarification and offer education.
“Neal’s unbelievably knowledgeable on scrums,” Ford says. “He wanted to educate the referees on what to look for. And it’s not a case of saying we don’t do this or that, or of dobbing anyone else in – it’s discussing cause and effect. I want to be able to say to my player, you were wrong then. But at the moment – and it’s not even from one game to the next, it’s from one scrum to the next – he does one thing and gets a penalty, then does the same thing and concedes a penalty. It’s very difficult to coach that player on the right thing to do.”
In his youth, Banahan played in the second row. He can now only watch from the fringes at the mysterious goings-on in the set piece. The winning penalty awarded to Northampton at a late scrum particularly grated, since the scrum had resulted from a Saints knock-on as they chased the game. Teams very often struggle more on their own put-in. There is not much of an effort to hook these days, but the responsibility of having to win the ball does seem to affect the quality of a side’s shove. Banahan cites a World Cup-winning captain in defence of an almost universally derided phenomenon – that of the crooked feed.
“I was speaking to John Smit once, and he said: ‘If I knock the ball on, why should I have a right to get it back by having the ball put in straight?’ In a way, I think people should be able to put the ball into their side of the scrum. It shouldn’t be a 50-50 right to get the ball, because you’ve knocked it on.”
The debates surrounding this troublesome area look set to continue. Bath must set them aside, though, and concentrate on the return to European action. All is well with them there, with the one win from one, but they travel to Wasps on Sunday, where they picked up the first of their four defeats this season. Dave Attwood will return to the engine room, having missed the past two defeats, which should stiffen the scrum.
From a solid platform, Bath may start to rediscover their zip elsewhere. Now would be a good time for Banahan to score his first try of the season. He is 28 and has not given up on reviving his England career. “If someone offered it I’d bite their hand off but I’m not going to be parading myself about, because it’s all down to performance. I feel brilliant, but then I look at people like Roko [Semesa Rokoduguni], who on his day is one of the most phenomenal wingers I’ve seen in the northern hemisphere. He’s got to have another chance for England.”
For that to happen, Bath are likely to have to prove to themselves and the rest of us that this perceived “crisis” is nothing of the sort.
