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.
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.
B?A?Z? B?A?L?L? BEARS BALL! 🏏
A homegrown lad carving up on the @ChampionsCup stage 🔪
Magic, @jack_bateszzz. pic.twitter.com/054JcrC1dY
— Bristol Bears 🐻 (@BristolBears) December 14, 2024
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.
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.
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.