Power struggle tears Bath apart
Griffiths leaves suddenly after just six months as chairman Tensions at the top plagued club during disastrous season
The bitter power struggle that divided Bath during their worst Premiership season in history culminated yesterday with the sudden departure of chairman Ed Griffiths after just six months in the job.
Telegraph Sport can now reveal the feud that has cast a dark shadow over the Recreation Ground. The former Saracens chief executive joined the club initially on a consultancy basis in November to conduct a wide-ranging review with Bath suffering a disastrous season at the bottom of the table.
Griffiths was then appointed on a full-term contract at the start of this year as chairman, replacing Bath owner Bruce Craig. But Griffiths will now leave The Rec after less than six months in the role, with Craig and Griffiths understood to have met for a conversation in recent days which ended with Griffiths’s departure.
It is understood Craig was only recently made aware of the deeprooted cracks lying beneath the surface at the West Country club.
Director of rugby Stuart Hooper will remain at the club next season in a new role as general manager, supporting incoming head coach Johann van Graan, who arrives from Munster ahead of 2022-23. It can now be revealed that tensions between Hooper and Griffiths have rumbled on behind the scenes in recent months, adding further disruption to an already desperately difficult season for Bath, English rugby’s major force at the start of the 1990s who have won little since.
A flashpoint between Hooper and Griffiths came when Bath’s season was all but over, with one last shot at redemption in the Challenge Cup. To prepare for their last-16 tie against Edinburgh, Bath had pencilled in a foreign training camp.
Yet as the camp approached the details changed significantly, allegedly at the behest of chairman Griffiths. Rather than train in Portugal, the squad were heading to Marseille, the host city of the European finals, on a team-bonding trip. And the coaching staff were not, initially, invited along for the ride.
Whether this was by accident or by design, it is not clear. Even when the coaches arrived in France, some were in different hotels from the rest of the squad.
When he found out, director of rugby Hooper is understood to have had a heated discussion with Griffiths.
Bath were enduring a miserable season before Griffiths was appointed as chairman and their fortunes have barely improved since then, with the club 12th in the Gallagher Premiership and having recently suffered a humiliating 64-0 defeat to West Country rivals Gloucester.
There is no doubt that the club
was in a tailspin, a world away from reaching the Premiership play-offs back in 2020 when Bath came fourth in the table. This season’s slump is just the culmination of two decades of underachievement given Craig’s staggering investment. So he turned to Griffiths as an agent of chaos to shake things up.
Prior to Bath, English rugby’s great underachievers’ title belonged to Saracens before Griffiths arrived as their chief executive, followed by director of rugby Brendan Venter, in 2008. Together they built the foundations of a dynasty to rival Bath’s glory days with multiple titles. Griffiths made more than a few enemies and stood down in 2015. He returned to Saracens as interim chief executive for 26 days following the 2019 salary cap scandal and briefly surfaced at Worcester in 2017 as well as being commissioned to produce a report on the future of the Championship in 2020.
Hooper and Griffiths’s roles overlapping reportedly led to friction. Take recruitment and contract negotiations. At the start of December, Hooper is believed to have informed England centre Jonathan Joseph that he would not be retained at the end of the season. Yet last month, it was officially announced that Joseph’s contract was being extended.
Meanwhile, Hooper had lined up a deal to bring in second row Ben Scragg from Cornish Pirates only for Griffiths to abandon the agreement. Scragg is now understood to be signing for London Irish. Piers Francis arrived at the club after signing from Northampton only to discover he was arriving as a fly-half option rather than a centre where he has played nearly all his career. Meanwhile Bath are losing both their Lions in wing Anthony Watson and No8 Taulupe Faletau. Seven signings are set to join the club next season, although how many of those were secured by Griffiths or by Hooper remains unclear.
Many internal observers felt Hooper has been undermined since Griffiths arrived. Aside from Marseilles, there have been other occasions that Hooper was left out of the loop on squad gatherings.
Much like he did at Saracens, Griffiths trod on plenty of toes. He can be as abrasive as a wire brush. Yet at the same time, a significant portion of the playing squad were on board with the changes that he had instigated.
Some supporters too will feel that a bit of creative disruption was no bad thing at a club that is traditionally seen as too cosseted.
Griffiths declined to comment when contacted.