There are plenty of things to see in Bath in December, and plenty of people visiting the city to see them. There’s the Christmas market at the abbey, the ice rink in Vicky Park, Cinderella at the Theatre Royal and the bloke playing No 10 at the Rec.
They have had a few good ones here over the years, even in the hard times when the club won nothing. Danny Cipriani, George Ford, Gavin Henson and Rhys Priestland have all done the job for them in the past decade. But Finn Russell is something else. He must be their best since Mike Catt left them to join London Irish 19 years ago.
The crowd included a few neutrals who were here, they said cheerily, just to watch Russell play. Some of the more pessimistic Ulster fans, who had seen enough of the team’s scrummaging this season to know they were likely to struggle, said they, too, were mainly looking forward to catching a glimpse of him.
In the end, it was not quite Russell’s sort of game. But still, some of his kicks and tricks were so audacious they made plenty in the crowd break out laughing.
It helps that he has so many weapons to use. On one side he had Ollie Lawrence, who is in untouchable form, and on the other, often as not, the hard-charging Alfie Barbeary, who led a formidable Bath pack. They won in large part because of the good, hard, ugly rugby played by Barbeary and the rest of the forwards in the second half, especially the two props Will Stuart and Beno Obano, who won the man-of-the-match award.
They were 14-8 down at half-time, which made the way they controlled the second half all the more impressive. The game had see-sawed for 50 minutes, but was settled decisively by the 70th. In the first half, the tries came like buses, no one scored anything at all for the first half-hour, and then three arrived in a rush before the break.
Bath got the first of them, through a fast, flighted pass from Ben Spencer way out to Joe Cokanasiga on the right wing. Jacob Stockdale came hurrying across to try to make the tackle, but he may as well have been trying to stop a runaway train.
Just when you were beginning to think Bath were going to pull away, Ulster came roaring back when Lawrence ran off the tryline to take a hack at a loose pass and ended up kicking it straight to Billy Burns. He gathered the ball in and skipped back through the gap Lawrence had left behind him. Burns is a Bath boy and went to school up the hill at Beechen Cliff. It was not so long ago he was working as a ballboy here.
Bath were still figuring out what had happened when Ulster scored their second.
This was set up by Stockdale, who came skipping up the middle after gathering in a kick. The ball ended up with Robert Baloucoune on the right wing. He had made a couple of menacing runs earlier in the game and this time he cut Bath apart by swapping passes with James Hume.
The second half, though, was a very different business. Bath started to bully Ulster in the set-pieces, and soon the visitors started to flag. Bath got one try from a maul, another from an attacking scrum and ran in two late ones from deep to finish things off.
The Bath forwards were up against Ulster’s South African World Cup winner Steven Kitshoff. Stuart, in particular, took a lot of satisfaction in besting him. “It was personal for him,” said the Bath head coach, Johann van Graan, “because he’s come up against Kitshoff a few times before.” Though Van Graan did not say it, he has had the worse of it more often than not.
Obano explained, in his own inimitable way, that he had not been too fussed about Kitshoff. “I think I’m a bad man,” Obano said. “I don’t worry too much whoever is on the other side.”
It helped, Van Graan explained, that the club had recently stitched their pitch, which meant it held together better in the wet weather. They are lucky their moneybags owner, Bruce Craig, has enough of the stuff to be able to do that in between home games. And enough, too, to be able to pay Russell as much as he does and apparently have enough left over to be the leading contenders to sign Henry Arundell and RG Snyman.
There is something stirring here right now, no doubt about it. The team have something of their old swagger back. Russell brings enough of it for everyone.
