Bees eager to put the turmoil behind them & get on with job

And now for their next trick Birmingham & Solihull will perform the gravity defying-feat of surviving the inaugural Championship season. At least that’s the intention. To be fair it can’t be much harder than what they have achieved this summer, namely keeping afloat an organisation that in recent times has leaked money on an industrial scale.

That is not to say they nearly didn’t manage. It took some fast talking and even faster fund-raising to fend off the unwanted advances of the Inland Revenue and disquiet among their playing ranks when their pay cheques didn’t arrive.

And for a time it looked as though the bonhomie and unity forged in the furnace of a National Two title winning season would go to waste and that the Earnshaw Experiment might run out of cash before valid conclusions could be drawn.

Broadly speaking Bees’ head coach is a sevensaphile, a believer that the handling skills, broken field running and appreciation of space that predominate in the abbreviated version of the game, can be harnessed to good effect in XV-a-side.

They certainly were last season as Simon Hunt smashed all manner of scoring records and back row forwards like Chris Brightwell and Rob Connolly enjoyed the open expanses en route to opponents’ try lines. Again and again and again.

This season it will be intriguing to see if they can run the length of the field from under their own posts in the way they did last. After all this, we are told, is now a serious fully professional division.

And the problem with that is that professionals have to be paid and for a short period that was not the case at Sharmans Cross Road, Earnshaw’s talents were professional in their side of the bargain alone.

It was not an easy time as Connolly admits: “It impacted on our training,” the Irishman says.

“People are at their best when they are relaxed and there was a lot of stress over the situation.

“Stressed people tend to pick up more injuries tend to not perform as well as they would.”

“There probably wasn’t the same skip in the step as there would have been had it not happened.”

A player meeting hammered out a way forward and once unity was established, in itself no simple achievement as men with families and mortgages aligned their interests with single, younger, home-based colleagues, the buzz has returned.

“The last two or three weeks we have picked up our training and been really positive about going forward with the club,” Connolly says.

“Thankfully it is just about all out the way now and we can just concentrate on what we are all here to do, which is play rugby.”

They get that opportunity at Plymouth Albion today as the new campaign begins in as teak-tough a level two environment as there is.

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