Rugby Lam’s not worried by Bristol’s poor play-off history
BRISTOL Bears’ torrid history in play-off games is not going to be a factor going into knockout rugby insists director of rugby Pat Lam.
His side face the Dragons tomorrow night in the quarter-final of the European Challenge Cup having not won a play-off game since 2016, and that was the high point in almost a decade of emotional heartache before Lam’s arrival in Bristol.
Last season the Bears were knocked out at the quarter-final stage of the Challenge Cup with a 39-15 defeat at La Rochelle.
Before that Bristol’s unenviable reputation for choking in knockout games stemmed from their experiences in the Greene King IPA Championship, the second tier of English rugby.
In 2016 Bristol won the Championship play-off finals to reach the Gallagher Premiership but not without drama, losing the second leg at home to Doncaster Knights. However, that ended years of heartache. In 2014-15, Bristol were agonisingly beaten 59-58 by Worcester Warriors over two legs in the Championship play-off finals, and the season before the club missed out at the same stage against London Welsh.
Having not made the play-offs in 201213, the season before Bristol were knocked out of the play-offs at the semi-final stage by Cornish Pirates as a season of hard work was undone with a terrible display at MennayeField.
In 2010-11, Bristol missed out on the play-offs having been beaten in the final the previous year by Exeter Chiefs.
But Lam, who arrived at Bristol in the summer of 2017, said he is not going to let
Bristol director of rugby Pat Lam
history weigh him down. He said: “I remember my first day here. I got the last 10 years of Bristol Rugby’s history up and showed it to all the staff and all the players and asked ‘What do you think?’
“They all replied: ‘Not great.’ Those were not my words, those were the words of the people who had been here because I had only just arrived. So I said, ‘What do you think?’ Change needs to happen.”
And there has been plenty of change. Just four players remain from the 2014-15 squad which suffered the play-off final agony against Worcester: Joe Joyce, Callum Sheedy, Mitch Eadie and Tom Kessell - and the latter two have only returned to club this summer after spells away.
Bristol will go into the game at Ashton Gate tomorrow as favourites having gone unbeaten through the group stages in the Challenge Cup and with a side packed full of international stars.
And Lam, who has built his coaching reputation on upsetting the rugby status quo when he led his Connacht side to the PRO12 title with a 20-10 victory over heavyweights Leinster in the 2014-15 grand final, says his side have the mentality to succeed in knockout games.
Lam explained: “I remember when Connacht played in the final against Leinster and they had all the Irish team and had been playing in every final for years. I remember people say ‘You have no chance, this is your first ever final. You don’t understand what this is.’
“My whole philosophy is our history, I love it because it tells us where we have come from and the lessons we can learn from it, but it is the vision which determines our future.
“I have been very blessed to be in many teams which have created history and won things for the first time and done things because the focus doesn’t become on the history.
“It is more about the here and the now, our vision and what we are trying to achieve with our goals and our plans; that is what has accelerated a lot of growth here at Bristol.”