Dublin rarely leaves Bath’s rugby players with a warm glow. On their last club visit they shipped 50 points, a record defeat in Bath’s European history and the time before that it was a celebrated coming together in a late-night Grafton Street burger joint between a former England lock forward, Danny Grewcock, and a former England centre-forward, Stan Collymore, which made unfortunate headlines.
Then there was last month when four Bath players were centre stage at the Aviva Stadium as Ireland, in the form of Johnny Sexton and Conor Murray, gave England something of a tactical masterclass in how to win a Six Nations Test.
Chief among those to suffer was Anthony Watson, one of the England back three tortured by aerial bombardment, who this week has been relaying his experiences in an attempt to prepare his Bath team-mates for Saturday’s Champions Cup quarter-final against Leinster when he, Dave Attwood, Jonathan Joseph and George Ford will again try to silence 52,000 fans intent on an Irish victory.
“We’ve learned a lot of lessons, we’ll be ready for this weekend,” says Watson during a break in training. “With England we lacked intensity in that first 20 minutes. We let them into the game and they got good momentum. We lost out in that area [the aerial battle] and we know we’re going to have to nail that down and build from there.”
Crucially both Sexton and Murray will be elsewhere on Saturday but Leinster’s Ian Madigan was Sexton’s understudy for 20 minutes of the international while Eoin Reddan also had a ringside view as high balls rained down on Watson, Alex Goode and Jack Nowell, finally leading to the Robbie Henshaw try which all but ended England’s Six Nations dream.
“Obviously, every time you represent your country its special and obviously we were disappointed that we lost and in the manner that we did, but going back there we will have learned a lot of lessons,” says Watson. “It’ll be good having had that experience and the boys who played in that game will be in good stead and the guys who didn’t play will have picked up on a few clues.”
Mike Ford, Watson’s head coach at Bath, has made sure of that. He has instructed that all four England players pass on their Aviva experiences and among eight changes to the matchday 23, he has called in Peter Stringer, not only capped 98 times by Ireland, but a Heineken Cup winner with Munster and a 37-year-old with a wealth of experience of Dublin rugby.
“George, Anthony, JJ and Dave, they have just been to the Aviva and they are telling us what it is going to be like,” said Ford. “The learning and the experience of that is valuable for us in our team talks and in terms of the way we want to play the game.
“I have seen some comments from Matt O’Connor [Leinster’s head coach] about the blueprint to beat Bath is what Ireland did to England. They are going to look to bottle up our scrum-half and get to George,” said Ford although he thought O’Connor might not take the aerial route, instead dreaming up another tactical ploy to unhinge an English side.
Against that O’Connor has troubles of his own. Leinster are far from the side which was top dog in Europe in 2009, 2011 and in 2012. In fact they are fifth in the Guinness Pro12 and parts of last week’s draw against Glasgow have been likened by the Irish Independent to watching “those old Harold Lloyd silent comedies”.However that was with most of Leinster’s Ireland contingent resting and O’Connor has made nine changes to the starting XV.
