It was another good victory for the Bears in Europe on Friday and despite the frustrating five-point deduction for fielding Elliot Stooke as an ineligible player in the first two rounds, the bonus point win and results elsewhere means that we have secured a home tie in the Round of 16 against Clermont Auvergne.
They may not be as powerful a French force as they were when they helped themselves to 51 points at Ashton Gate back in 2020 but they are definitely the sort of team we want to see visiting BS3 on a more regular basis. It’s just a shame that without the admin error we would have finished top of our pool with guaranteed home games all through the knockout stages.
As for the tie itself, it highlighted how we continue to search for that elusive 80-minute performance and it's hard to understand why we didn't fire a shot in the second half after laying siege in the first. Was it because the opposition upped their game or was it because we took our foot off the pedal?
Probably a combination of the two but after momentarily slipping the clutch by letting the French raiders score first, the Bears then moved rapidly up through the gears before the break after which they got stuck in neutral for the rest of the contest despite working hard to manoeuvre the gear stick.
Now don’t get me wrong, on a freezing night, fan cockles were and truly warmed by the likes of Randall, Gengey and Thacker zipping around the park, Radrada and Batley smashing into French units and MacGinty exploiting lines of weakness like water through limestone, but with a very tough league assignment away to Saracens next up you do fear that the second-half sloppiness will be punished more harshly by the North Londoners than it was by the Southern French.
However, we were only a Joycey forward pass away from a famous victory last year and they will be losing more players to the England training camp than us, so we need to take comfort from this and feed on the intermittent quality that we have showed since the humbling defeat at London Irish.
We do have some excellent players and if they perform better and more consistently together as a team then we can compete again at a much higher level. I could be wrong, but I sense a subtle devolution of power and decision making from the coaching staff to the playing group and perhaps this rebalancing of responsibility may be the catalyst for a return to league form. Up the Bears!
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