In the heat of battle, sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men can go awry and sadly for the Bears their European adventure was exterminated by the cool cats from Bordeaux-Begles who found a way to halt their assault on the Champions Cup. Despite some questionable officiating, the Bears were, at times, also the authors of their own downfall and ultimately more Jackie Collins than John Steinbeck when it came to the quality of the script that they wrote for the game.
When the line ups were announced it looked like Bordeaux only appeared to have three things going for them – size, speed and skill – so rather than relying on the previous game’s special forces smash and grab behind enemy lines when the main battle had looked all but lost, it was clear that this time round the Bears would need to focus on an all-out offensive. By including the likes of Yann Thomas, Kyle Sinckler, Dave Attwood, and Nathan Hughes from the start, and deploying Chris Vui to the back row, there was no doubt that the heavy artillery was being lined up for a serious bombardment on the Bordeaux lines before unleashing the cavalry of General Sheedy, Brigadier Radrada and Wing Commander Piutau. However, whilst the hope was for an Agincourt, ultimately it became a Hastings as the hosts arrowed towards victory in the final quarter of the game as the previous 60 minutes had ebbed and flowed between the peaks of high skill and the troughs of low discipline. This time, however, there was to be no reprieve.
That said, the omens had been good before kick-off as the players made their way along what was described by the TV commentary team as professional rugby’s longest tunnel, although calling it a tunnel was somewhat disrespectful to all subterranean walkways the world over, as it appeared that the players actually emerged from a shopping mall, crossed a road and then climbed up several flights of stairs before finally making it onto the pitch. The Bristol subs made an excellent effort to whip up their teammates into a frenzy with some vigorous shoulder slapping, manic whooping, and military style boot stamping and in Jake Woolmoore’s case, a full-on body shake not seen since the early days of acid house. Moreover, John Afoa attempted to get a psychological advantage over Bordeaux’s grizzly coach Christophe Urios, by giving him a friendly pat on his substantial buttock as he walked by. To say he looked less than amused is an understatement, but the big prop got away with it by hiding behind Semi’s beard and it clearly spurred the team on, as within six minutes a glorious sweeping first phase move allowed Henry Purdy to slice through the French defence like a hot knife through an oven-baked camembert and at that point you felt that there would be the chance of many more cheese related analogies to come as the Bears went about their business with a certain amount of brie-o.
But unfortunately, like a longstanding, yet irritating friend that you can never get rid of, ill-discipline had other ideas. Gifting a player like Jalibert penalty after penalty within his kicking range was tantamount to a court marital offence and it seemed like Bristol’s game sense decided to go AWOL on too many occasions. It was telling that at the end of a half where they had looked relatively comfortable and at times dangerous, they still went into the break one point in arrears.
And so, the second half followed a narrative to which Bears fans have become worryingly accustomed but this time there was no fairy tale ending. Usually, there is the odd turning point that will determine the outcome of a close game but in the second half there were so many that it felt like the contest was spinning round in circles. On one hand there was Bristol’s failure to be clinical when it really mattered and on the other, there was the officiating’s descent into pantomime. Progressing from a pretty steady effort in the first half to a Widow Twanky-like one in the second, the ref did two of the worst things that anyone in authority can if they want to lose control of a situation: first, to change your mind on a decision that you have already made with your own eyes by relying on inconclusive video evidence from a French TV producer who has been ingesting Absinthe through an intravenous drip for the previous six hours and secondly, to blatantly bottle a clear and easy decision as when Harry Randall was bodychecked less than a metre into a tap and go penalty. By shouting ‘play on’ the ref not only let the Bordeaux player off the hook of a yellow card but then gave their flanker carte blanche to smash the poor lad into kingdom come. Forget about being a supercharged Duracell bunny. As Harry Randall was lying face down and barely conscious on the turf like roadkill on a twelve lane American freeway, he must have been wondering what precisely he had done to annoy the rugby gods. Since being selected for the England squad with great fanfare and outpouring of Bristolian love way back in January, he has subsequently played zero rugby, that is, the thing that got him picked in the first place, spent most of the training camp running after overhit Ben Youngs box kicks until he got injured and then had to return to Bristol and see his good mate Callum Sheedy swaggering around the HPC with a Six Nations title wining medal round his neck whilst all he had to show for his enforced time away was a basic certificate of attendance and a few bottles of Molton Brown shampoo that he had nicked from from his hotel room. Living the international dream.
But on the plus side, one benefit that did come out of the second half officiating was that it definitely improved the UK’s generally poor knowledge of foreign languages. There aren’t likely to be many watching Bears fans who now don’t know that ‘examen par l’arbitre’ means ‘TMO review’ in French, given the number of times it was flashed on the screen, and although the ref did penalise Bordeaux just as much Bristol, he spent so much time shouting ‘lachez, lachez’ at their tacklers that you felt it would have been fairer on his vocal chords and the actual rules of the game if he had simply blown his whistle and given a penalty. If you are constantly telling the tacklers to let go, then it kind of suggests that they aren’t letting go, so you blow your whistle and you give a penalty. It really should be that simple. Otherwise, you fall into the trap that every ineffective parent has done over the years by threatening to take the sweets away from their kids but never actually doing it and then wondering why they end up with multiple fillings by the time they reach adulthood. Or maybe he was just getting all hot and sweaty in the midday sun and was simply hallucinating about the imminent opening of the pubs back the UK.
Having said all this however, it is dangerous to lapse into what historians call ‘counterfactuals’, as it is a meaningless and thankless task to go back over all the ‘what ifs’ and it achieves the square root of precisely eff all. The result will never change. We will never know whether Bristol would have gone onto win if the Jalibert try had been given as a five-metre scrum. Maybe they would have scored from that and maybe Bristol would have incurred a yellow card. And even if the penalty for the body check on Randall had been given, who’s to know whether Bristol would have capitalised on the one-man advantage. You couldn’t say they had been particularly clinical up to that point and in fact when Bordeaux did go down to 14 players, they ended up scoring anyway. Nope, whilst some of the decisions were shockingly bad, what is also true is that in the second half Bordeaux competed like demons, defended like trojans and upped their peckers to the extent that it was hard to begrudge them their victory. The fact of the matter was that Bristol only really managed to break through on one occasion and even then, Lady Luck shat on poor Purdy as the ball was dislodged just as he was about to touch it down. The final result is always a product of factors that teams can and cannot control, coming together in time and space to deliver a verdict that ‘is what it is’. If you are upset that you have had a ball displaced and it is given as a knock on, then get yourself into a position to score again, and if you aren’t happy that the ref has started penalising you unfairly, then put the opposition under more pressure so he turns his attention on them. Never has ‘you either win or you learn’ been more apt. If you can’t take control of a situation then you are risking events taking control of you. Despite his obvious disappointment it looked like this week’s post match Pat also sensed the same, despite his sunburnt cheeks and wry smile. He knows.
Every lost game is disappointing and hopefully the Bears will not be too hard on themselves by the manner of the defeat. Bordeaux-Begles are a top French side and for a lot of the game they had to fight tooth and nail on their home patch to secure the victory, which was clearly a lot narrower than the final score suggested. The story of the game was Bristol starting brightly but eventually fading and being unable to find a way of changing the narrative when the game started to go away from them. As usual there was no lack of effort and, given the state of the Covid levels on the continent, it’s probably not the worst thing in the world to have come back from France with a negative result. At least now the squad have got a chance to recharge batteries and re-cut their jibs after a brutal tour of recent duty. The boys will be hurting, both literally and metaphorically, but a few days of reflection in Semi’s sauna will no doubt remind them that whilst they have been subdued by one mountain there is still another one to conquer. The race to the Premiership summit continues!
If you want to hear more about this game then click here and head over to the latest episode of the Bears Beyond The Gate podcast, made by fans for fans!
Filthy Rig 