Play-off final preview
By Mark W-J
May 23 2014
After 142 games over 246 days, which generated 6,540 points (including 780 tries) at an average of 46 points and 5.5 tries per game, we are left with two teams: Bristol and London Welsh. The two pre-season favourites will do battle over two legs to decide who returns to the Premiership for the 2014-15 season, which kicks-off less than three months after the current Championship campaign finishes.
This is the fifth season of Championship play-offs, and it’s fair to say that the format hasn’t been universally embraced, especially by Bristol fans. This is the third time in five years that they’ve finished top in the regular season, and on both previous occasions they failed to negotiate the knockout stages. In 2009-10 they finished four points clear of Exeter, each winning 19 of their 22 games, and having comfortably negotiated the pool stages despite a solitary defeat at Bedford they swept London Welsh aside in the semi-final at the Memorial Stadium before claiming a narrow 9-6 win at Sandy Park in the first leg of the final. What happened in the return leg is the stuff of nightmares. The Exeter fans will tell you that Rob Baxter and his coaching team had strategically placed cameras all around the ground, and used the extensive footage to unpick all of Bristol’s moves, all of their lineout calls, and all of their defensive lines, as a result of which the Chiefs adopted a gameplan to negate Bristol’s strengths. The extent to which that story is true is debatable, but the outcome wasn’t, with Gareth Steenson landing six penalties and two drop-goals in a 29-10 (38-16 on aggregate) victory. Two years later, it was arguably even worse. You won’t find a single London Welsh fan who would argue with the assertion that Bristol were the best team in the Championship in 2011-12. Although they lost five games in the regular season they finished seven points clear of Bedford, with Welsh a further seven points adrift in fourth, although we both qualified comfortably for the knockout stages as the top two teams in play-off Pool A. I should probably apologise to any Bristol fans reading this, as the memories of what happened next are still raw, even two years after the event. The knockout stages had now been amended to include two-legged semi-finals, and with a 17-9 half-time lead at the Mennaye it appeared that Bristol would take a healthy lead back up the M5 for the apparent formality of the second leg. Yet, out of nowhere, Pirates conjured the most devastating spell of rugby, scoring five second half tries, including 19 points in the last 12 minutes, to leave the favourites in disarray. The return leg was tense, with Bristol needing to overcome a 21 point deficit but wary of playing fast and loose given their experience in Cornwall, and a 29-18 victory saw them eliminated. Welsh, of course, wrote our own fairy tale ending in Penzance in the final, and ultimately claimed the prize which - in all fairness - belonged to Bristol.
Much has been made this season of the strengths around which the two clubs have built their games. For Welsh, defence has been the key - only 348 points and 38 tries conceded in the regular season - whereas Bristol have attacked at all costs. They scored 116 tries at an average of over five per game, collecting 18 try bonus points from 23 matches; almost 75% of their 786 points came via tries. It’s an approach for which they have been criticised on more than one occasion, when they have eschewed simple kicks from in front of the posts in search of five or seven points from the catch-and-drive or first-phase ball from the top of the lineout - it’s a high-risk ploy, and one which certainly cost them at the Kassam in November. But they finished eight points clear of Welsh at the top of the table despite an identical record of 19 wins and four defeats, and will have taken great heart from the way that their attack stretched our much-vaunted defence in the return fixture at the Memorial Stadium on Good Friday. There has also been a suggestion that Nicky Robinson has missed far too many conversion attempts as he hasn’t been fine-tuning his radar by lining up penalties whenever Bristol get within range, but their tactics in the semi-final second leg away to Rotherham indicate that they can play it tight, and Robinson can deliver, when necessary.
Many people have referred to Bristol in recent weeks as a Premiership club in waiting. It’s a claim that their fans don’t take kindly to - and, to be fair, it hasn’t emanated from the club, but it’s easy to see why people get that impression. Despite having (until recent weeks, at least) two football league clubs, Bristol is a big rugby city, with a fierce local rivalry against Bath and, to a lesser extent, Gloucester. They have made a number of big signings ahead of next season, including Dwayne Peel, Ryan Jones, Matthew Morgan and Anthony Perenise, which has led to accusations of recruiting for a Premiership season before they’re sure of promotion. Jones made his debut at Rotherham, taking over as captain for the second-half, and after a quiet first 40 minutes his influence became apparent as his team overturned a half-time deficit. There has been condemnation from some quarters of the way in which he was brought in just for the play-offs, but most of that criticism has been made in ignorance of the circumstances in which he was signed before the transfer window closed at the end of February and immediately loaned back to the Ospreys - a very clever piece of negotiation by Andy Robinson, Sean Holley and owner Steve Lansdown. George Watkins, the Championship’s second highest try-scorer this season with 17 - and Bristol’s top try scorer in each of the last four seasons - is leaving for Cardiff Blues after the play-offs, while scrum-half Ruki Tipuna has signed for Newcastle, and three-quarters Fautua Otto and Errie Claassens have been released.
We’ve talked a lot this season about the fact that Justin Burnell employs a squad rotation system, but you’d expect that, moving into the play-off final - which has been his objective for over eight months - he would have a fairly good idea of his strongest team. Yet we’ve played 25 league fixtures and six British & Irish Cup matches, and Justin has named 31 different starting XVs. If you were to try to guess his strongest line-up based upon the number of times they’ve been selected, the team would be as follows:
15. Seb Jewell, 14. Seb Stegmann, 13. Tom May, 12. Sonny Parker, 11. Nick Scott, 10. Gordon Ross, 9. Rob Lewis; 1. Nathan Trevett, 2. Nathan Morris, 3. Peter Edwards, 4. Matt Corker, 5. Peter Browne, 6. Mitch Lees, 7. Carl Kirwan, 8. Ollie Stedman.
Even this line-up includes some artistic licence, as Mitch Lees has made most appearances in two different jerseys, so Matt Corker is selected at lock by virtue of his combined appearances in both second row positions. Yet that is another line-up that hasn’t been named in its entirety - in fact, on average only half of those players have been chosen for each game, and when we visited Bristol at Easter, with a squad which some people guessed was pretty much full-strength, only five of these players - Stegmann, May, Edwards, Corker & Kirwan - started.
The second leg will, of course, be Bristol’s final game at the Memorial Stadium, their home since 1921. Originally used by Clifton RFC in 1893, it was given to the club by the Sherriff of Bristol, who had bought the land after it has been used for allotments during the First World War, and became their second permanent home after the Country Cricket Ground, which was their base from their formation in 1888 until the War. Bristol Rovers moved in in 1996, initially as tenants but quickly becoming co-owners, a move which cost the rugby club dear when they entered administration following relegation from the Premiership just two years later and were obliged, under the terms of the agreement, to sell their share to the football club for a ‘nominal fee’. In 2007, planning permission was granted for a complete redevelopment of the Mem, including hotels and student accommodation, which would have seen the rugby club temporarily relocate to Rodney Parade for up to two years. However, issues with Rovers’ preferred partners and the impact of the financial downturn saw the plans scrapped, and the site has been sold to Sainsburys - although Rovers will stay for another year before moving to a proposed new ground on the UWE (Bristol Polytechnic to older readers) campus. Two years ago, Steve Lansdown, the owner of Bristol City FC, became the majority shareholder in Bristol Rugby, and it is with City that the club will groundshare in future. Plans for a new purpose-built stadium at Ashton Vale were dropped after further issues with planning regulators in the city, and work started immediately after City’s final home game of the season to redevelop Ashton Gate, which should fully re-open with a 29,000 capacity and facilities to match most modern stadia in two years’ time. The second leg of the final sold out two weeks in advance - the capacity of 12,100 is barely 1,300 fewer than our aggregate attendance for ten home matches at the Kassam this season - and will be the first sell-out at the Mem since Bristol entertained Gloucester in November 2006. It’s also a higher attendance than seven of the twelve Premiership clubs achieved for a regular home fixture this season ie excluding ‘Big Events’ at Twickenham or Wembley, and the St Patrick’s Day jamboree at the Madejski.
Most followers of the Championship have agreed that this has been the most competitive season at level two in the hierarchy for many years. The standard of rugby is commonly acknowledged to be five or six years behind the Premiership - that is to say, the general quality is at a level where the Premiership was five or six years ago - but all of the top four would have fancied their chances of competing with Worcester and Newcastle in the top flight this season. Many Worcester fans are concerned that their team won’t have the comfortable march to promotion in 2014-15 that they enjoyed three years ago, and Leeds, Rotherham and the eventual runners-up will be confident of giving Dean Ryan’s men a run for their money. If it is Welsh who prevail at the end of the next two games, then we will go up in a much stronger position than we were two years, although if you were to look at it objectively you would have to say that Bristol are the best equipped of the four semi-finalists to survive in the Premiership. They have the infrastructure, the fanbase, the RFU academy, and, as full members of Premier Rugby, they have additional central funding. As mentioned previously, Bristol have made a number of signings for next season who should slot seamlessly into the Premiership environment - as Ryan Jones proved last weekend, and Dwayne Peel has demonstrated week-in, week-out during Sale’s annus mirabilis, age is no barrier to top class players, while Matthew Morgan is arguably the most creative fly-half Wales has produced in a generation. Three weeks ago, Sir Ian McGeechan proposed that two clubs should be promoted to the Premiership with a moratorium placed on relegation and promotion for the next five years, but fans of Premiership clubs, as well as the Championship clubs, were united in their opposition. This is the one time of the year when the second tier is in the shop window. Most of the Premiership clubs’ message boards carry threads about the upcoming final, and the general consensus is that Bristol are favourites. Both clubs have won eleven of their twelve home matches this season, so you would imagine that our best chance of overcoming Bristol would be to run up a big winning margin in the first leg to leave them chasing the game - much as happened to them two years ago. On the other hand, you wouldn’t expect them to be quite as gung-ho as they were at the Kassam in November - their performance in the second let at Rotherham showed that a more pragmatic approach can pay-off. It really is too close to call.
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PADDYTAF.
There are stats and analysis in there that would put many pros to shame.
Agree with PaddyTaf brilliant.
weather for next Wed is drizzle and cool with a decent northerly
The games are likely to be too tight to call, with pressure making both ties potentially even closer. One little bit of brilliance or a mistake could turn things around.
As a Bris fan I think we could just edge it if we play the tight forward dominated game plan we saw employed to great effect against Roth in the second half. If we try our running rugby at all costs then I see us falling behind and not recovering.
Both games will be won up front, as usual.
So hang on to your hats, it will be brutal and tense beyond words. I have my beta blockers ready!
Try and enjoy the occasion as there are not many times either side are in finals of an important competition. For me the last game at the Mem will be an emotional night, win or lose.
Bring it on!
You have a great club and a fantastic fighting spirit which shows your never back down approach.
Good luck guys I know you can do a number on Bristol they have spent a long time in the championship regrouping and building a winning squad again but its what you do on the day that counts and I know your boys will leave nothing in the changing rooms and nothing on the pitch after.
Good luck Welsh