Bears sign a reality cheque as Falcons feed at the Bristol food bank

At the end of a week when the UK Government appeared to consign fiscal prudence to the history books, Bristol Bears enacted their own kind of meltdown by flushing possession rugby down the toilet in spectacularly poor fashion. It was less a run on the pound and more a stumble on a ground where we have struggled in the past, not least last year. Forget market jitters, it was the the dangerously irregular heart beats of Bristol fans watching the horror show through clasped fingers that required some sort of intervention.

It was a bad day at the office, there can be no doubt, and even the optimistically deluded David Brent would have struggled to have found any positives from the experience such was the paucity of the fare on show. Life on the road isn’t supposed to be easy and if you rock up at rugby union’s equivalent of a wet Tuesday night in Stoke against a team smarting from a previous week’s defeat and simply expect to stroll to victory, then you are likely to get your pants pulled down and your bare buttocks exposed, both literally and metaphorically. 

And in Dan Thomas’ case, usually both. 

Nope, if Bristol want to have more consistent free love on the Premiership free love freeway, then they must perform a lot better than this when they are far away from Ashton Gate.

The fact that the hardest working members of the Bears squad were the video analysts tells you all you need to know. It was a Bristol stat massacre of big data proportions and post-match Pat was in no mood to sugar coat it. ‘Newcastle were phenomenal’ he said. ‘They were hungry and we kept feeding them all night’. Well, yes if ‘phenomenal’ means running hard, tackling hard and keeping hold of the ball. A basic requirement for all teams I would suggest, which highlights how bad the Bears really were as they couldn’t even meet that standard. We were the roadkill for the Falcons appetite and once they got the taste of blood they didn’t let go.

It also highlighted Pat’s less than subtle change of direction when it comes to the hackneyed cliché about ‘learnings’ when we lose heavily and badly. This result was to be ‘flushed straight down the toilet’ and never to be spoken of again and was one of the few examples that could not or should not be applied to the ‘you only win or you learn’ mantra. Admitting that you need to learn from a performance like that means admitting that you have no idea what you were doing in the first place which has the potential of creating an existential crisis that even Jean Paul Sartre would struggle to articulate.

What was even more disappointing was the fact that having got back into the game with two laboured tries when Newcastle were two men down, the Bears were then unable to carry that momentum into the final quarter. Rejecting such a generous, and lets face it, undeserved gift was borderline criminal. Where was the focus, where was the precision, where were the cojones? Surely this is what this ‘culture’ chat is all about? It’s one thing putting on a show at Ashton Gate in front of twenty thousand of your own fans but it’s quite another when you are far from home and staring down the barrel. That was what was most disappointing – the regression to flawed individualism when clearly there needed to be a communal rank closing exercise.

Apart from perhaps AJ MacGinty and to a lesser extent Piers O’Connor we looked blunt in attack and struggled to create the required amount of sustainable momentum to provide even the possibility of a victory. It was surprising that the fly half was substituted after we had hauled ourselves back into the contest as it seems to me this was the time when we really needed his game management experience to take control of the last quarter. Surely this game situation was exactly the reason why we signed him. Kick to the corners, keep the opposition on the back foot and squeeze a win through territorial and possession pressure, a strategy which the Falcons executed to perfection.

If the backs had an off night then it was nothing compared to the pack. Yes, they put their bodies on the line, and yes it’s easy it for me to raise a critical eyebrow from the comfort of my keyboard but then again if you choose a job that involves sticking your head where it hurts then just like anyone else in any employment you are expected to do perform as well as you can. Letting one of their players run through a line out maul unopposed, getting carded for a unnecessary cheap shot tackle and losing your expensively assembled head to someone you admit to never having heard of does not endear yourself much to fans. It was bad enough watching all of this unravelling on the telly but God knows how the Bristol fans in the stadium must have felt. The only relief was that the Falcons faithful didn’t appear to break out into a spontaneous rendition of Sweet Caroline but to be honest if they had done I would do have let them off. It was that bad.

So where do we go from here? Well, the beauty of sport is that there is always another game from which redemption can be sought. Exeter Chiefs at the Gate on Friday is about as big a challenge as you are likely to get after a weak willed and lily livered defeat. This performance will tell us where we really are on our path to glory and I fully expect the team to offer a more controlled and focused performance. They simply must.

After the wild fluctuations of last season the hope was that we had started to move away from boom and bust rugby-nomics towards more game plan stability but the reality is that we still seem to be way off a triple A rugby credit rating. Despite the poverty of Friday’s performance and the frustrating emotions that it created we must still believe in our path to Premiership prosperity, back the team as best we can and and hopefully roar them to victory against the Chiefs. Up the Bears!