Can We Break the Duck? - Bath Preview
By BrianC
February 15 2006
This Saturday many of the faithful travel down the M4 to watch our boys take on Bath at the Recreation Ground. As you could have said about Kingsholm until a couple of weeks ago, The Rec. has not been a happy hunting ground for us.
We have won only once there in the professional era. That was in the Powergen cup in our victorious 2001/2 season.
It is not that we haven’t come close to winning, many of our games there have been perilously close, some even drawn. Almost certainly the most excruciating of our Rec. defeats was that in our relegation battle with them three years ago. With seconds to go we were 13 – 15 up, Bath were certain to be relegated, and then Elvis entered the building with one of the softest tries we have ever given away. Despite help from on high before the game we went down 18 – 15.
We had one of our more comfortable wins of this season, picking up a try bonus point, against Bath at the Madejski last November. Mike Catt was named man of the match against his old club in our 36 - 13 victory.
After a brief renaissance in 2003/4 and a respectable 4th place finish last season Bath again appear to be struggling in the top flight. They are currently 10th in the premiership on 26 points and are one of only four clubs who have scored less tries than us so far this season. They do however however seem to be getting their act together recently. Last weekends win at Saracens was crucial to them and in the round before that, some two weeks beforehand, they claimed the not insignificant scalp of Wasps at the Rec.
Had it not been for our abysmal performance at home to Newcastle last Sunday I would be more optimistic about this match. As things stand I find myself worried. If our team walks out onto the Rec. pitch with the same attitude as the one that faced Newcastle last Sunday we’ll get mullered. Hopefully they’ll be as fired up for this game as they were for the previous game at Gloucester. If that’s the case we can break this duck.