Bath v Saints - Nonsense & Sensibility

By Mark H
September 26 2003

Every season, Saints seem to have one game that you watch and wonder who the hell nicked the team. Last season Tigers at home, the season before was the cup final.

. Let’s hope that the…showing (if anyone can think of a suitable word, please insert it here) is the one for 2003/04 - on the evidence presented today it will take a minor miracle to even get a solitary point off Wasps next week.

Outplayed and out-thought, that I can live with. It happens. Out-passioned is something that is harder to swallow. That’s now eight tries in two games let through. Bath should have had eight tries on their own, so if anyone from that end of the country tries to convince you that they are back, it would be fair to point out that a decent team would have not let them have so many chances. If you thought that their believing that they were going to win the league last week was over the top, then the reaction on leaving the ground today was that they had actually won it already. Calm down fellas, wait until you’ve actually beaten a decent team first…

Saints were most definitely not a decent team, far from it. Considering that we all knew that the pack would be under immense pressure, we needed other phases of our set-pieces to work, like the lineout. We stole the first lineout of the game on the Bath throw, and all looked good. It then took until the 54th minute to win one on our own throw, and that was one of the two won on Saints’ ten throws all game. Frankly, not good enough. Bluntly, disgraceful. If the pack wasn’t going backwards, it was going up or down, although credit must go to a very experienced Bath front row for whom Duncan Bell looks an excellent acquisition.

The pressure was on from the start, with an early drop goal attempt being missed, but Saints seem determined to be pointing both barrels at their insteps. Whilst under pressure, Saints managed to steal possession from a scrum (not sure how, but more on the new stand later), and the adventurous play seen at Edgeley Park next week continued with the ball being fed along the line to Bealer. Who promptly knocked on. The ball was recovered by Lipman, who fed Lee Best to score in the corner. Barkley missed the conversion, but we thought that this was a minor diversion.

We hadn’t counted on the unforced error count. If the Saints team of 20th September 2003 were a tennis player, it would be Anna Kournikova - attractive to look in theory, but unable to do the simple things right, and eventually giving up trying. And believe me, that hurts a lot. I gave up on the penalty count, let alone the stupid penalty count, and referee Dave Pearson had given JL and Mark Connors a warning that cards would be produced long before the interval came.

Barkley knocked a penalty from halfway off the bar, which just (and I mean just) fell for Saints. Saints only seemed able to progress by playing “kick the ball to the full back”, and eventually that game catches you out. From a scrum, Brett Sturgess was penalised for collapsing the scrum, and from the resulting penalty/lineout combo, Olly Barkley stepped off right foot, then left, then right to score a try reminiscent of Shane’s last week. Just to prove he wasn’t perfect (and in my opinion the Bath sponsors naming him as man of the match were very wrong - should have been Brendon Daniel), he screwed the conversion across the face of the posts.

Finally, on 33 minutes, Saints had a decent attack. Awarded a free kick for Bath closing too early at a lineout, Drahm, Leslie and Reihana combined to force the ball to the Bath line, only for the ball to be snatched away. Bath then knocked on over their own line, and Saints fans behind the try line thought that Darren Fox had pounced to score, but Pearson had already given the scrum. Bath were then penalised at the scrum, and Saints went for the reset. We then got a penalty for hands in the ruck right in front of the posts two yards out, and Shane kicked the three.

You’d have hoped that it would go to the break at 10-3. We didn’t count on (or perhaps could have, given how the afternoon went) Barkley kicking another penalty, and then Chris Malone hitting the post with a drop goal attempt.

13-3 down, and one way traffic. The second half started with a succession of silly penalties being given away by the men in green, one of which Barkley put over. On 54 minutes, the aforementioned lineout win (WOOHOO!!), but even then the ball was turned over for Bath to grind their way down to force a penalty five metres out. Their attempt at a flying wedge was held up over the line, and Saints managed to disrupt two scrums enough to win a penalty.

The only other Saints attack of note came from a kick from Bealer which Oriol chased down and forced a penalty. The inevitable tap eventually led to another Bath offence, but even though there was a 13 point deficit, JL instructed Shane to take the three. That was on 61minutes; three minutes later came the inevitable yellow card for Darren Fox for not rolling away. There had been enough warnings, and eight minutes later came card number two, this time for Chris Budgen. The flying wedge this time was penalised for crossing.

Barkley (if there were any doubt about the result) put Bath out of sight with another penalty with five minutes left in the clock, and then right on the 80th minute, and having seemed like he had been waving for the previous ten minutes, Beattie knocked down Wood’s cross field kick for replacement Gray to go over in the corner. Bath didn’t quite make their four tries, but were good value for their 24-6 win. Anything I have missed is probably due to my seat, in the lower tier of the Virgin Mobile stand. It has a very low rake and therefore two corners of the field are totally obliterated by heads. I’d recommend anyone who wants to sit on that side in the future to sit in the upper tier.

So where do we go from here? Three points from two away games is a couple less that I’d hoped for, whilst 8 tries conceded is a lot more than expected. The front row could get taken apart again next week by Dowd and Leota, and that is a worry. Today proved you can’t run the ball back from your own try line every time, and also that you can’t give any team in this league the amount of chances, penalties and mistakes that Bath were presented with. No disrespect to Bath, but they’re not going to win the league. Wasps could. It may be too early to say it, but next Saturday could be the pivotal moment of the season. Blowers and Peillard were badly missed, but the team have to learn to win without them.

Most worrying of all was the clear lack of pride in the performance. I’m proud of my team, and that’s why I got up at twenty to five to get ready to go on the second longest trip of the season. I wasn’t proud of what went on today, either the performance or reaction to it whilst things went pear-shaped. As a Saints fan, I shouldn’t need to question whether players wanted to wear the shirt, their effort should tell me that. It didn’t.

Let’s put this one to bed now, and look forward. It can’t get any worse…can it?


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