Rugby Lam targets trophy glory in the Champions Cup
BRISTOL Bears’ long wait to be back in the Heineken Champions Cup will come to an end this weekend as director of rugby Pat Lam can officially tick off another one of his goals when he arrived at the club in 2017.
But rather than rest on their laurels, Lam has raised the bar on his expectations for the club again, setting his squad the target of winning the biggest prize in European rugby, which is in the trophy cabinet of Gallagher Premiership rivals Exeter Chiefs. That might not be this season, but soon.
Lam said: “I’m massively excited. It’s in our vision to be a team that consistently, year-on-year and forever, contests the Champions Cup. But I don’t want us to be a club which just gets into Europe and are happy to be in it. We have got to go after the star, go after the trophy. It is so exciting to be involved.”
Bristol won their first significant silverware in 37 years when they beat Toulon 32-19 in the Challenge Cup final in October and Lam says that experience can only help the club as they step up the quality of the opposition this season.
“Pretty much everyone who won the Challenge Cup are still here,” he said. “We know as a group what it took to win that and that emphasises that if you do the work you get the rewards, but we said after the final we will have to go up another level now.
“These are the sort of games you want, because they grow you as a club, grow you as players and give you really good recognition to be a part of big-time rugby.”
It has been a long 12-year wait for a return to Europe’s premier competition, and while Bristol were gruelling it out in the English Championship and the dreaded British & Irish Cup for the best part of a decade, tomorrow’s opponents ASM Clermont Auvergne were playing in Top 14 and European finals.
Lam said: “This is our first time in the Champions Cup as a club, as a group, for many years, but we don’t see that as a negative, we see it as a positive.
When looking at the numbers, the gulf in experience between Bristol Bears and Clermont in the Champions Cup is staggering.
Bristol have played just 12 games in the competition, never getting out of the group stages, while Clermont have played 114 matches, famously reaching the final on three occasions but never winning it.
But despite the difference in experience they are two clubs built with the same attacking DNA.
On their way to lifting the European Challenge Cup just 53 days ago, Bristol were the top attacking side in the competition, averaging 37.1 points per game. Clermont, who incidentally won the Challenge Cup in 2018-19, were the top attacking side in the Champions Cup, scoring more than 33 points per game - an awful lot of which came against Bath.
As for Clermont, Lam knows one of Europe’s top clubs are heading to Ashton Gate tomorrow having been knocked out at the quarter-final stages last season by eventual finalists Racing 92.
Lam said: “You look at them and they’re going really well in the TOP 14 (sitting fourth behind La Rochelle, Toulouse and Racing 92).
“There’s a lot of world-class players. I coached some of them in the Barbarians, so I know the quality.
“They’ve got to the finals and it’s their big dream to win it. To play against them is a good marker of where we are and how far we’ve come as a club.”