GP: Bristol Rugby vs. Northampton Saints - Preview

The first law of all being is self-preservation, it is to live.

(Niccolo Machiavelli)

Guinness Premiership Round 13 (rescheduled)

Bristol Shoguns vs. Northampton Saints

Sunday 25^th March, 2007 17:30 MSK

While enduring Sky’s fixation with the Scarlets during the Heineken Cup this season, something akin to a teenager who has just discovered his genitals, Russians new to the game have often asked me “Why are there so many Ls in Llanelli?” The answer is simple: since the formation of the town’s rugby club, every time a new genetic line has been introduced into the Dyfed toilet’s gene pool, the town council has added an extra L to the town’s official name.

This is also the case in Bristol, where locals try to compensate by sticking an extra L on the end of every word they say, and where Saints will travel on Sunday to play their game in hand, as they continue to try to clutch at safety like a pissed Derwyn Jones trying to pick up a pound coin superglued to a greased dance floor.

Before the start of the season, it would have appeared that the first ‘to do’ on the checklist of every coach in the country was to finish above Bristol - everyone in the media and in the stands had them going down this year. The phrase that their pack wouldn’t be able to take another season of Guinness Premiership rugby was as oft repeated as S4C replays of Colin Charvis clapping himself off the pitch as Wales lost in Rome before the enlightened readers of the Western Mail voted him a more vile human being than Osama bin Laden.

The pundits have been proved wrong. I don’t know what odds you would have got on Bristol being above Heineken Cup entrants Sale, Wasps, “London” “Irish” and the Saints with only four games left to play with the bookies at the start of the season, but I would imagine that they would be of a similar length to those offered on Wellingborough coming both bottom of the nationwide teenage pregnancy league and top of the United Nations quality of life poll in 2007.

Everyone likes Bristol, primarily because they are not Bath, nor have they been even remotely close to being so since Stuart Barnes wobbled off down the road to the Wreck in 1985. The ensuing bitterness among Bristol fans is chartered on a mammoth thread on the Bath site, so long running, dull, repetitive and predictable in its humour that the only thing I can imagine being similar would be being forced to watch the entire 236 episodes of Friends back-to-back.

Bristol are the prime exponents of what is known in rugby circles as the Sale Theorem. This states that the latent level of ‘second team’ support for the club amongst fans from the 11 other GP sides is inversely proportional to their success or lack thereof. Ergo, I like Sale a lot less today than I might have done this week, and everyone in the country outside of the Georgian Meccano set of Bath has been willing the Shoguns on all year as they attempt the most unlikely bid for the top spot since Rock Me Amadeus by Falco hit number one on the Billboard charts in 1986.

Bristolians have had no sporting success to cheer since they won the John Player Cup in 1983. To put that in perspective, at that time Mikhail Gorbachev had yet to come to power, Aberdeen were beating Real Madrid in European Cup finals, and not a single person who lists novelty act Muse among their favourite bands was as yet so much as a twinkle in their parents’ eyes.

Bristol, known to supporters of its various sporting institutions as BRISTOL, is the largest town in the United Kingdom never to have had a team play in the top tier of English football. If this is because they are all playing rugby, then, for my entire lifetime at least, they have been crap at it. Just like Northampton, they are a big club in the heads of their fan base, but with little in the way of tangible success to show for it in the trophy cabinet.

If Bristol can beat the Saints this weekend, they will take a large step toward securing a top-four finish and ending a spell so barren it makes the papal vow of celibacy look like a premiership football team’s mid season break in La Manga. Saints’ need for four points from the fixture is somewhat more immediate, with rumours rife that some prankster has already spray painted Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin on the door of the home team’s changing room at Franklin’s Gardens.

The game between the two sides earlier this season was a carbon copy of nearly every Saints match this year. Dominant in both territory and position to the extent that the opposition were nilled in the first half, Saints proceeded to throw it away through a Juan Manuel Leguizamón-like ability to somehow throw away guaranteed scoring opportunities, with our back play veering between a simplicity and naïveté worthy of the Royle Family’s scriptwriting and something so frustratingly self-indulgent, talentless and amateurish it could have been marketed as a James Blunt album.

The corresponding fixture last season was equally frustrating, though for almost opposite reasons. With the Saints 16-0 down and just minutes left on the clock, Bristol substituted their key players, presumably as an end-of-season thank you to their legions of fans who leave every game early regardless of whether their team is winning or not. This resulted in their scrum going backwards quicker than a Welsh history lesson and a collapse so total it may as well have been Stuart Barnes’ knees at the moment JSD touched the ball down in that Baabaas match. Northampton’s Heineken Cup-clinching win in that game provided the best climax to anything since Bruno Brookes accidentally played Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name in its entirety on Radio 1’s Top 40 show.

This match was originally due to have been played in January, but was postponed due to a pitch so sodden, boggy and turbid it could have been the Millennium Stadium, and this is probably a blessing for the Saints. Possibly due to engaging in the longest preseason since 1988, the Shoguns are currently in freefall, and their chances of topping the league seem to be receding quicker than the Aral Sea shoreline.

If it wasn’t for Newcastle’s love of incurring ridiculous one-point defeats, Bristol would not have won a game since the Saints match in round 14, and they plummeted in my estimation when they allowed themselves to be nilled by Wasps, thereby allowing a bunch of 4x4 driving middle managers who take cowbells to rugby matches to go to work feeling deliriously good about themselves on a Monday morning. Still, we can sleep soundly in the knowledge that Saints’ ‘nice’ list (fans, stadium, dog) does not extend to helping other teams end their losing streaks.

My Gloucester-supporting friend is convinced that Bristol won’t win another game all season, working on the premise that they have to face the four teams with the most to play for in their last four games, with games against the Saints and Worcester ‘they think they’re a proper Southwest rugby club’ Warriors followed by Leicester and Gloucester. I am certainly glad that we won’t be facing the Lions on the last day of the season; this season could give Gloucester residents their biggest reason to party since they successfully managed to have Bristol annexed into Avon in the 1970s.

Despite being third in the premiership and having won five more games than they have lost, the Shoguns’ points difference sits at -8, evidence of some fortunate wins and complacency by other premiership teams. Admittedly, Northampton’s is -135, evidence of a complete inability to score tries, kick penalties, turn pressure into points or execute a game plan, and the fact that Madonna’s hymen would offer more resistance than our defence at times.

For those Saints fans heading to Bristol this weekend, what can you expect? First of all the West Country is very much like Moscow, in the respect that it desperately tries to copy London, but only from a distance of 15 years. Secondly, those travelling will need to adjust their normal schedule thanks to the clocks going forward an hour and the fact it is probably easier and quicker to get served a jug of Pimms in a Govan pub whilst wearing a top hat than it is to find your way from Temple Meads to the Memorial Stadium. Thirdly, don’t expect to have enough time to be able to do more than one of seeing the game, finding a pub, and parking your car within three miles of the stadium with peace of mind concerning the safety of its contents. Bristol is twinned with Tbilisi – it shows. There are also the pasties, and Saints fans will be afforded the chance to join pub bores talking about Guinness everywhere by going on and on and on and on and on about how they taste so much different in this one spot from anywhere else in the world.

The Memorial Stadium is effectively a 1970s football ground, complete with authentic terrace language, cider-fuelled machismo and enough pigeon shit to provide a renewable energy source for the entire country until the next century. The Centenary Stand has a gradient so steep it would give the Iroquois nosebleeds; the West Stand is what a cricket pavilion would look like if the Quinnell family had used it as their marital bed, and which, despite its size, seats only 23 people, while the Clubhouse Terrace requires away supporters to have their passports stamped upon entry. The pitch itself has less consistency than a Western Mail article and is filled with more sand than the entire U.S. Army in Iraq’s combined porn stash. Bristol’s supporters don’t have any songs or chants, but are sometimes known to drone Brizzzzzzz-uuuuull en masse, though it is impossible to tell whether they are cheering or jeering their team when doing so.

Bristol coach Richard Hill is a shrewd operator and targets certain games while more or less throwing others, and with Hill stating that he is expecting just two more wins before the play-offs, I would assume that the game against the Saints falls into the former category. Bristol are expected to welcome back a number of influential figures for the fixture, but Saintly eyes will be more firmly focused on one man than Wayne Barnes is on ignoring set piece infringements…

Most Saints fans would have preferred to try to procreate with a cheese grater than see Andrew ‘the Saintsman’ Blowers line up against Northampton in the colours of another GP club. Whilst the blue of Bristol is definitely not the Hurricane’s colour, it is at least better than seeing him in their 2005/6 strip, when they wore old Reading FC shirts with an upside-down but to-scale representation of Sarah Ferguson’s most famous feature sewn on the front.

Blowers was brought in following long-term injuries to two of the premiership’s best back rowers, Kiwi and new Stuart Barnes three-letter acronym lovechild Dan Ward-Smith and inspirational captain Matt Salter, and it is no surprise that the Shoguns’ form is suffering without them. Blowers is likely to be lining up at number 8 this week in their absence, and the one-on-one against Saints very own late season draftee Christian ‘Gerhard Schröder’ Labit should be interesting to say the least.

Last Saturday’s Sale game saw the first even remotely balanced Saints back row this season and despite being slower to wide play breakdowns than the IRB is in acknowledging the existence of third-tier rugby, I imagine it will remain unchanged against Bristol. Tupai’s steel will be needed to counter the abrasive Roy Winters and/or Nathan Budgett, especially as Pat Barnard and David ‘size 49’ Gerard look set to miss out again. Stand-in captain Joe El Abd doesn’t get the plaudits Salter does, but Ben Lewitt will have to be on his game to counter his impressive ground work. I expect Darren Fox to be on the bench again, though he may be too tired after spending the week denying rumours that he and adopted Bristolian Josh Lewsey enjoyed a night of passion together circa 20 years ago, after damning photos of Saints’ new cross-code starlet signing emerged in the national press. (You do the Google image search…)

In the front row, Bristol are likely to welcome back the arse/face conundrum that is Mark Regan, whose career has been one long paddy throwing exercise since Steve Thompson took the England hooker’s shirt from him. Dylan Hartley did a fine job in neutering the number two in the home tie, and is turning into a player more than capable of getting under the opposition’s skins. That Regan has a fuse so short even Jamie Theakston would feel comfortable using the urinal next to him could be to the young England pretender’s advantage come Sunday. Hartley is likely to start alongside Tom Smith and John Brooks, who has finally given Saints a viable second specialist tighthead option, leaving Soane Tonga’uiha to come on as the very epitome of an impact sub in the second half.

Regan is likely to play front row Lucky Pierre between Darren Crompton and Dave Hilton, which, when coupled with the lock pairing of Gareth ‘old enough to remember when Wales wasn’t an English county’ Llewellyn and Sean Hohneck, provides a front five with a combined age equal to the half-life of Selenium-82. Together, the Bristol pack is rugby’s equivalent of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of individuals seemingly not good enough to exist in their own right, but who (unlike the literary charlatans) add up to more than the sum of their parts. They have undoubtedly been key to Bristol’s resurgence. Unfortunately, this ethos of the collective appears to be the exact opposite of the Saints, who seem evermore more like a stag party of fifteen drunks in matching uniforms, all too petrified to think for themselves as they are paralysed by the thought that they’re going to be the one who wakes up naked in Exeter or Coventry with one eyebrow missing.

In the backs, Bristol welcome Shaun ‘fourth best scrum half in Scotland’ Perry back from injury and outside him could be last year’s premiership’s top scorer the solid but ultimately uninspiring Jason Strange. Exceptional Kiwis David Hill and Neil Brew are also possibilities, though only one of them will be able to be on the field at any one time thanks to Mohamed Al-Fayed like passport issues. A back three which could comprise any of Bernado Stortini, Josh Taumalolo the Lamont-like Lee Robinson and the man who seemingly scored more tries against Saints last season than Saints have scored in the whole of 2007 David Lemi, will also threaten to punish any aimless kicking, dropped balls or slow passes. Again, it’s a good job none of these are Saints traits.

It remains to be seen whether Grayson will continue with the Myler, Kydd, Spencer axis experiment, though surely Saints need some consistency in team selection, especially if Quinlan is again ruled unfit, and Myler simply has to be on the field to kick the goals. The return of Sean Lamont from mysterious sin-binning duty in Paris will likely facilitate Bruce’s return to full back and Cohen, until last week the only Saints’ player with a double figure number to score a try in the GP in 2007, is likely to line up on the left.

I imagine the teams will line up something like this:

Bristol Shoguns

15. Taumalolo

14. Robinson

13. Brew

12. Cox

11. Lemi

10. Strange

9.   Perry

1.  Hilton

2.  Regan

3.  Crompton

4.  Llewellyn

5.  Hohneck

6.  Winters

7.  El Abd

8.  Blowers

Northampton Saints

15. Reihana

14. Lamont

13. Spencer

12. Kydd

11. Cohen

10. Myler

9.   Robinson

1.   Smith

2.   Hartley

3.   Brooks

4.   Dam. Browne

5.   Short

6.   Tupai

7.   Lewitt

8.   Labit