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LONG READ Will Bristol's daredevil 'Bears-ball' deliver the trophy they crave?

Will Bristol's daredevil 'Bears-ball' deliver the trophy they crave?
1 month ago

When Baz-ball works, England win Test matches with firecracker cricket; when it doesn’t it can unravel just as spectacularly. It seems to be the same with Bears-ball.

The phosphorescent rugby which has lit up the Gallagher Premiership dimmed when it came to the Champions Cup. Successive heavy defeats against Leinster and La Rochelle have cast Bristol adrift at the foot of Pool 2.u

The losses were not shocks as such – the opponents are two of the three best sides in Europe – but the scale of the reverses were a reality check. Momentum has been halted, a stick thrust into the spokes of a season which was promising much.

Sam Prendergast
Leinster and La Rochelle outgunned Bristol handsomely in their opening two Investec Champions Cup matches (Photo Brendan Moran/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

Can Bristol simply dust themselves off and get straight back in the saddle when they return to Premiership business at Leicester this weekend or will there be nagging doubts left by the events of the past two weeks?

Pat Lam cannot afford the sobering experience of the Champions Cup to impact self-belief.

Every side needs confidence but when a team plays the way Bristol does it is doubly important. The Bears’ fluid style – glorious to behold when it is in full flow – runs on high-octane positivity. The message from the top will stay the same – keep on playing wherever you are on the pitch.

Effective as Bristol’s run-from-everywhere approach has been in better conditions against inferior domestic opposition, it could not make much of a scratch on either of the 2023 Champions Cup finalists.

“It’s like parenting your kids,” says Lam, the Bristol director of rugby. “What you permit, you promote. If you promote fear, it will come through to the players.”

But short-term memories are hard to wipe.

A week after Leinster ran away from them with their bench quality, Bristol were physically overpowered by La Rochelle, with their house-sized humans Will Skelton and Uini Atonio.

Effective as their run-from-everywhere approach has been in better conditions against inferior domestic opposition, it could not make much of a scratch on either of the 2023 Champions Cup finalists.

Ronan O’Gara, La Rochelle’s head coach, commended Bristol on their great brand of rugby after the match at the weekend they play but in the next breath noted his side could have put 70 points on their English guests.

Can Bristol’s daredevil style deliver the silverware the Bears crave this season?

Lam, the architect behind Bears-ball, believes so. He cites the evidence of Connacht’s fairytale Pro12 triumph under him in 2016 when the unfancied Irish province employed a similar blueprint and confounded the odds to lift the trophy at Murrayfield.

“Rassie (Erasmus) was coaching at Munster and I remember him saying to me: ‘I don’t know how you won that.’ When you look, we had the lowest budget, we were a bunch of no names but the players just played the system,” he said.

“If there’s clarity on what you’re trying to do as a team you can win anything.”

A remarkable collective though Connacht proved to be, Bristol have superior individuals. They have current England internationals in Ellis Genge and Harry Randall and the Premiership’s leading try scorer in Gabriel Ibitoye. They have a stand-off in AJ MacGinty who tops the league’s try assists chart by a distance and a No 8 in Fitz Harding who is in the top three in offloads, tackles and carries.

Gabriel Ibitoye is the Premiership’s top try-scorer and tops numerous attacking metrics in England’s elite division (Photo by Bob Bradford – CameraSport via Getty Images)

Harding’s take is that rather than being risky, running the ball from their own 22 – or as happened on several occasions in France at the weekend from behind their own line – is just playing to their ball-handling strengths. That is what they spent most of their pre-season honing and that is what a lot of their in-season training focuses on.

Drilled in the art of highwire rugby, they are wedded to their team’s unique approach.

“I think a lot of teams will say they kick because it mitigates the risks, that if you’re playing with the ball you’ll risk making a mistake, but the way we mitigate risk is by training to improve our skill execution,” said the Bristol captain.

“If I’ve got the ball on the 22, what’s a better decision for us? Is it to box kick it onto the halfway line and make a 50-50 with our aerial battle, or is it to play wide and carry the ball to the halfway line?

“For us playing wide is less risky because we practice it and we feel confident in executing it.

“I completely understand teams who say it’s better to box kick it, but that just doesn’t make sense for us.”

Bristol, second behind Bath on points difference, have a testing period coming up in the Premiership. The three games before the next slice of Champions Cup action pit them against Leicester and Saracens away with a home game against Sale sandwiched in between.

Even in mid-winter? Even in mid-winter. Lam pressed his men to continue playing “Bears rugby” after the rain had fallen in La Rochelle, just as he did in the stormy winds against Leinster. Perhaps it was unwise but that is the Lam way and he is not for changing.

The silver lining for Bristol is that the season’s prizes are not handed out in mid-December but in the June sunshine which will suit their style better.

Lam’s title-winning Connacht team lost four league games in a row in December and January but when the grounds hardened up they pushed on to make history with the province’s first trophy.

Bristol, second behind Bath on points difference, have a testing period coming up in the Premiership. The three games before the next slice of Champions Cup action pit them against Leicester and Saracens away with a home game against Sale sandwiched in between.

The Bears have more questions to answer after the events of the past fortnight but it would be unwise to write them off as a Premiership force at least. If they make the play-offs, they will be a threat to anyone on a fast track.

Whether they press on or blow up domestically, it is going to be entertaining watching. One thing we can be certain of is that Bristol will carry on playing Bears rugby.

“We’re in the entertainment business,” said Lam. “The amount of feedback that we have had, the amount of kids that are coming to our games, I’ve had so many messages from lots of people about the brand of rugby we’re playing, which is excellent.

“It’s not just about winning. Don’t get me wrong, that’s what we all want, but there’s ways to do it that can bring people to our game.”

In trying to pull off the juggling act of not only winning but doing so with panache, Lam is chasing a mirage in some people’s eyes but at a time when rugby union is having to fight like crazy for Gen Z eyeballs trying to provide an 80-minute highlights reel he should be lauded for his ambition.

Comments

5 Comments
T
TI 37 days ago

I don’t think so. True champion sides can deploy all types of games, including a classical trench warfare arm-wrestle. I don’t think the Bears quite have it in them. Not sure a team can win a trophy with highlight reel rugby alone. It’s easier to disrupt it, than it is to create it.

A
AA 37 days ago

The prem games this season have mainly been great to watch , with the exception of Sale. So boring and predictable.

Let's have more of Bristol, Bath , Quins etc style of play.

Rugby needs expansive play to put more bums on seats . Not the dirge of rolling forward mauls constantly trying to bully their way over the line.

It has its place yes to draw the defence but the fans want to see more running rugby . Not win at any cost and sod the entertainment .


T
TI 37 days ago

Hard disagree. For those who want to turn rugby into league, there’s already league: a sport nobody cares about, globally speaking.

The beauty of rugby is in its variability: many different ways to win. I want to see running rugby, I want to see free flow counter-attacking rugby, but I also want to see mauls, and scrums, and lineouts, and proper breskdown battles with exciting turnovers.

There is a reason rugby is a top 10 global sport, whereas no one really gives a hoot about league. You’ve seen 20mins of a league match, you’ve seen it all.

I don’t want to see rugby degrade into 80 mins of foot race. And I don’t think, that that’s what the majority of rugby fans want.

B
Bob Salad II 46 days ago

I’m a Bristol fan and it’s been brilliant watching them play this season and huge credit to Lam for the philosophical and strategic buy-in he’s gotten from his players.


My concern - and as illustrated against Leinster, is how the Bristol approach will hold up through the wet and windy winter months when fast, free-flowing, 15-man rugby becomes harder to execute.


Squad depth - again, illustrated by the capitulation to Leinster when McGinty went off, is also something that might see performances drop over the second half of the season.


All that being said, If they can hold firm’ish then you expect them to be in the top 4 come the Spring.

T
Tom 46 days ago

Also a Bristol fan and echo your sentiments.


I love watching Bristol but their approach will only get them so far I think. Exeter played like this when they first got promoted to the prem and had intermittent success, it wasn't until they wised up and played a more balanced game that they became a consistently top side.


I really want Bristol to continue playing this brand of rugby and I don't mind them running it from under their posts but I don't think they need to do it every single time. They need to be just a little bit more selective about when and where on the pitch they play. Every game they put themselves under so much needless pressure by turning the ball over under their posts trying to do kamikaze moves when it's not required. By all means run it from your goal line if there is a chance for a counter attack, we all want to see Bristol running in 100m tries from under their posts but I think until they learn when to do it and when to be pragmatic, they are unlikely to win the premiership.


Defense has been a real positive from Bristol, they've shown a lot of improvement there... And I will say that I think this kamikaze strategy they employ is a very good one for a struggling side and could be employed by Newcastle. It's seems to have turned around Gloucester's fortunes. The big advantage is even if you don't have the biggest and best players, what you have is cohesion. This is why Scotland keep battering England. England have better individuals but they look muddled as a team, trying to play a mixed strategy under coaches who lack charisma, the team has no identity. Scotland come out and give it full throttle from 1-15 even if they struggle against the top sides, sides like England and Wales who lack that identity drown under the relentless will and synergy of the Scots. If Newcastle did the same they could really surprise some people, I know the weather is bad up there but it hasn't bothered the Scots. Bristol can learn from Scotland too, Pat is on to something when he says the following but Scotland don't play test matches like headless chickens. They still play with the same level of clarity and ambition Bristol do but they are much better at picking their moments. They needed to go back to this mad game to get their cohesion back after a couple of seasons struggling but I hope they get a bit wiser from matches like Leinster and La Rochelle.


“If there’s clarity on what you’re trying to do as a team you can win anything.”

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