High five for Uren on historic day for Bristol

ANDY Uren broke a longstanding club record as Bristol set up their first quarter-final in 12 years at Top 14 high-flyers La Rochelle.

Uren led the charge as the 17-try Bears demolished 14-man Enisei-STM at Ashton Gate.

The scrum-half scored four times in the first-half and once in the second to become the first Bristol player – and only the third British player ever – to score five tries in a European Cup fixture as Pat Lam’ side romped to a clubrecord win.

It secured a best runnerup spot and sets up another meeting with the Pool 4 winners La Rochelle who they beat at Stade MarcelDeflandre during the pool stages.

“I’m really pleased,” said head coach, Pat Lam.

“We can park this competition now knowing that we’re still in it in April and by the looks of things we’re going to be going back to La Rochelle, which will be great.

“It’s a job well done. We’ve used a lot of Englishqualified players and had a lot of young guys playing in this competition and they’ve done well to get the group into finals rugby, which is great.

Lam added: “We know it will be a tougher game at La Rochelle than last time because they know what to expect and we can’t take them by surprise, but we’ll worry about that in April.

“Like anything, regardless of the score, we look at, and tick off, all of things we did well, but more importantly, take our learnings from there, and there were a lot of things that we can be better at.”

Adding to Uren’s five, Ryan Edwards grabbed a hat-trick, Jordan Crane and Tom Pincus two apiece, and there was one each for Tom Lindsay, Yann Thomas, Piers O’Conor, Sam Graham and Reiss Cullen.

Enisei did cross three times through Denis Simplikevich, Uldis Saulite and Stanislav Selskii, but a third minute red card to Maxime Gargalic for a high tackle made a tough job almost impossible for the Russian champions, who finished bottom of the pool with one point.

Star man Uren said: “I think that’s more tries than I’ve scored during my whole time at Bristol!

“I’m really happy with it but I was on the end of a lot of tries that were made for me by my teammates. We’re pleased to get the job done and can look forward to a quarter-final now.

“It’s been 12 years since this club has reached the knockout stages in Europe, so we’re delighted to have done that.”