PAT PUTS THE PARTY ON HOLD!
PAT Lam had to walk into a packed team room at Bristol Bears’ world-class high performance centre and pull the plug on the club’s end-of-season party yesterday.
He had to plug the keg that was about to be opened by his Hawaiian shirt-clad players because the Bears’ season might not be over just yet. The Bristol director of rugby made no secret of the fact some, if not most, of his players have been on a three day in-house bender to celebrate beating Toulon 32-19 in the final of the European Challenge Cup on Friday.
When your club hasn’t won a significant trophy in 37 years you party hard. And they did, with some doing an all-nighter in the south of
France before flying back to Bristol to continue the revelry.
But Wasps’ place in the Gallagher Premiership final to face Exeter Chiefs is still in doubt after the club recorded four more positive cases of Covid-19 from emergency testing done on Saturday, having had seven positive cases on Tuesday last week.
Wasps have been in consultation with the medical leads at Premiership Rugby, the RFU and Public Health England, and will continue not to train as they look to contain the outbreak. A decision on whether they will play in Saturday’s Premiership final will be made following the results of a further set of testing to be undertaken today.
That means Bristol Bears, who are the next best-placed side, having finished third in the table, are on standby until tomorrow.
Lam said: “I want to make it absolutely clear that we believe that Wasps and Exeter should be contesting this final. They thoroughly deserve it.
“Lee (Blackett - Wasps head coach) has done an unbelievable job and Rob (Baxter - Exeter director of rugby) has done an unbelievable job, and Chiefs were awesome again on Saturday (to win the Heineken Champions Cup final). It is excellent for the Premiership to see what Exeter have done.
“We have been put in a situation which is not ideal, but everything with Covid is not ideal.
“We thought we had a one percent chance we would be involved (in the final on Saturday) but even though we enjoyed ourselves, we kept our bubble as a group.”
If Bristol are called up to play at
Twickenham on Saturday, despite having been beaten 47-24 by Wasps in the semi-finals of the Premiership play-offs, Lam will not accept any excuses from his side.
He has kept the likes of Callum Sheedy and Ioan Lloyd from joining up with Wales ahead of the Six Nations game this weekend, along with the club’s England internationals and Lam said he will be in a position to field an even stronger side than the one which won the European trophy in Aix-enProvence on Friday.
Lam said: “I am not a big fan of anyone around here making excuses, we make a plan and we work to it. If the goalposts get moved we adjust and adapt to it. This is just one of those circumstances. It is not ideal, we want Wasps to play Exeter.”