All rigs and no filth as Wasps demolish Bears at the Coventry Building Society Stadium

When your team’s warm up is by far the most clinical part of the match and Max Lahiff is top of the try scoring chart after two games, then you know it hasn’t been the best start to the season. Bristol followed their opening day defeat against a suffocating Saracens side with an even worse one against an energetic, sharp and increasingly confident Wasps outfit.

As the late lamented sports journalist, Martin Johnson, once said of the woeful English cricket team of the late 80s, ‘there are only three things wrong with them; they can’t bat, they can’t bowl and they can’t field’, so something similar seemed to ring true for the Bears. The only three things wrong with their performance was that they couldn’t catch the ball, couldn’t keep possession and couldn’t stop Wasps scoring, and in a week where lack of distribution became a national issue, Bristol Bears had multiple problems with their own supply chain, finding it more difficult to shift the ball out their wingers than it was for Hover to deliver fuel to a forecourt. If, on the odd occasion, one of their wingers did manage to get hold of the oval, it was soon snaffled by the Wasps defence quicker than a cabbie filling a jerry can at a BP garage. Forget about being ring rusty. It was more a case of rusty rings as Wasps found multiple ways to penetrate the Bristol rear guard. Whereas match day one could perhaps be explained as a hangover from the excruciating semi final defeat in June, this performance had more of the whiff of long Covid about it without a booster jab in sight. Whatever the management say, the team looked more undercooked than frozen chicken thighs on a disposable beach BBQ with a performance that was less sizzle and more shemozzle.

Winning games of rugby is built on solid foundations and regardless of how many metres, carries and line breaks are recorded, if they yield no points then they are simply illusions built in sand.

There was precious little in the game to cheer from a west country point of view as the Bears huffed and puffed but couldn’t blow Wasps’ identikit ring road house down. It wasn’t that many players had bad games, it was just that man to man they were 5-10% less better than their opposite numbers with the cumulative effect being a gaping scoreboard chasm when the final whistle blew.

That said, there were small glimmers of hope. Harry Randall looked sharp when he came on and once Henry Purdy had pumped his pistons on the warm up bike, he gave a glimpse of what we had been missing and what we hope will be coming. Charles Piutau looked his dangerous self in fits and starts but even superman struggled when Lex Luther stole is kryptonite and yet again, he failed to complete a full match. In the forwards, the front row at least achieved parity and Dave Attwood threw himself around the first half like he always does, but unfortunately the south sea trio of Vui, Hughes and Luatua were unable to change the narrative of the game. The Bears were soundly beaten and trudged off the pitch to lick their paws.

Of course, the beauty of sport is that it isn’t too long before you have a shot at redemption so what more could the team ask for than the chance to put things right under the lights in front of 25,000 punters. The best way to get over a hammering is to administer one yourself and what could be better than lining up the whipping boys from down the road. After that shower at the weekend the best thing to do is to jump in the Bath and scrub away the memory of defeat.

If Bristol go hard early and sharpen up the basics then it’s difficult to see how the old enemy will be able to live with them given their own inevitable travails. With a half back pairing who have barely finished choosing their GCSE options, a prop forward who’s barnet has just been placed on a terrorist watchlist and a star signing who broke a finger nail within 5 minutes of his debut and is unlikely to be seen again until truffle season finishes, Bath have not got a lot going for them. And with news filtering down the A4 that Semi Radrada may be fit to play, there are also reports that Jonathon Joseph has checked himself into a nightmare reconditioning clinic to avoid descending down in to Dante’s 9^th level on account of memories sustained the last time he played at Ashton Gate.

The upshot is that neither side can really afford to lose but given that the Bears are at home, have got the better squad, and spent so long wrestling the bragging rights away from their neighbours that it would be a criminal offence to hand them back, they have to be favorites.

Bring it on!

If you want more of the same then click here for Episode 82 of Bears Beyond The Gate, the Bristol Bears podcast made by fans for fans.