Guinness Premiership Betting: Broken Bath must recover from this self-inflicted pain

Rugby Union / Ralph Ellis / 06 August 2009 / Leave a comment

Bath are getting serious as they strive to shake off the party tag that brought shame on the club last year. Ralph Ellis reports...

"Bath are 8.4 to be regular season winners in the Guinness Premiership, and if they do start to apply themselves have the talent to make that good value. As for the 32 to be winners of the Heineken Cup – well now that really would give them something to party about!"

Ian Holloway once told me one of his theories of how to run a successful football club - always check the character of your most senior pro.

"Think back to when you were at school," he explained. "I'll bet you can tell me straight away the name of the kid who was the best games player in your class". And he was right. I could. (His name was Pete O'Connor, just to prove the point, and that's remembering back far more years than I care to admit to).

"Now," said the wise Ollie. "I'll also bet that everybody wanted to be his friend." Right again.

"So your football club is the same. Everybody in the dressing room knows who they think the best player is, and they all want to be his friend. If he's like Eric Cantona at Manchester United, going back to do extra training and skills practice every afternoon, all the young players want to do the same thing, which is where Beckham, Scholes and the Nevilles came from. But if he's out partying every night . . . well what do you think the young players choose to do then?"

Now before he took the job at Blackpool, Holloway was living a few miles outside Bath so it's a shame that nobody at the rugby club had asked him round to hear that theory. If they had done, they might have been able to sort the place out long before they got mixed up in the scandal that ended this week with three players being handed nine month bans for refusing to take a drugs test.

The warning signs should all have been there, when in the middle of last season Matt Stevens was sacked and banned after admitting to taking cocaine. We thought that was a one-off, the product of a player who was mixing with the show-biz set at the same time as playing professional sport. Instead it's turned out to be a symptom of a bigger party problem at the club, where because the players were the sporting heroes in a small city they felt they could act as they chose.

Damningly, even the official judgement for this week's disciplinary panel that dealt with Michael Lipman, Alex Crockett and Andrew Higgins confirmed that "many rumours about drug taking existed in and around the Bath rugby squad". Stevens must have been an inspiration for the others.

Surely, nobody on the club's management could claim they didn't know what was going on. And just as important, the senior players must have known too, and turned a blind eye. Their decision now to set up a leadership group made from their more experienced stars looks very much like a case of bolting the stable door long after the horse has gone.

Thankfully even England prop David Flatman, one of the five players on the new committee, is honest enough to admit their failings.

"I feel disappointed in us," he's told today's papers.

"We are aware our reputation was becoming one we didn't want, as a bit of a party club. There are ways the five of us could have done more to stop our club acquiring that reputation."

Flatman, along with Danny Grewcock, Joe Maddock, Stuart Hooper and players' union chairman David Barnes, will each take responsibility for a group of younger players and try to provide mentoring and guidelines. And maybe it might just help Bath, once English rugby's Manchester United, regain their focus on having a good time on the field instead of off it.

Bath are [8.4] to be regular season winners in the Guinness Premiership, and if they do start to apply themselves have the talent to make that good value. As for the [32.0] to be winners of the Heineken Cup - well now that really would give them something to party about!

Here's five things you might not know about David Flatman...

1. Born in Maidstone, Kent, in 1980, his middle name is Luke. His dad, who played prop for the local club, introduced him to rugby aged eight

2. He went to the same school - Dulwich College - as fellow England prop Andrew Sheridan and they played together in the front row of the school team

3. He won a reputation as a successful TV pundit during a year out for an Achilles injury

4. He once said: "Other than climbing Everest I can't imagine much harder stuff to do on a Saturday than scrummaging in the Guinness Premiership"

5. His brother suffers from Down's Syndrome, and he became a patron of the Down's Syndrome Association last year

Tags: Alex Crockett, Andrew Higgins, Bath, David Flatman, England, Guinness Premiership, Matt Stevens, Michael Lipman