Bristol Bears players return to pre-season in a little over two weeks' time and Pat Lam has revealed his squad face ‘one of the toughest’ summers of their lives.
After reaching the giddy heights of finishing top of the table in 2020/21, Bristol have badly under-performed in the last two seasons, finishing 10th and ninth in successive years to miss out on a place in the Heineken Champions Cup. When you have being a consistent Champions Cup team emblazoned on the wall of your £11.5m state-of-the-art training facility as a core identity of the club and having set out a blueprint to win domestic and European titles, those finishing positions come as a severe disappointment to fans who were given license to dream big.
