Ronan O’Gara enjoyed many wet and rugby nights in his playing days with Munster and this cooked-up competition has stirred up some fond memories. An old-school Irish dog more than hinted at his journey Rupella taking his side early in the evening, he seized the enemy and built up a lead large enough to save them from the general battle of Bath.
With a safe escape to the new door Champions Cup It was also an irritating time for English observers. Bath currently sit at the top of the Premiership table and are widely considered strong contenders in Pool 2. They are seen here as a huge reminder of the French Top 14’s pack a lot of knocking, as they have a point to prove.
And it didn’t help Bath when their captain and key tactical kicker Ben Spencer pinched his nerves on the eve of the game. Apart from his scrutiny, he was nowhere near as good as he was in the first half, and half as seriously as he burst into life in the second. An opportunistic attempt by lock Quinn Roux brought the host back to within a point of the third quarter, but a subsequent penalty from Ihaia Occidental helped to secure victory for the champions of this tournament in 2022 and 2023.
O’Gara, for his part, was warned every week of the need to step up their form and efforts. In the aftermath of the team’s shock defeat at the weekend, Vannes said the team lacked ‘attitude, balls and character’ which he said were the ‘cornerstone of any successful ABC outfit’. It is hardly necessary to emphasize that he wanted to see a marked improvement, regardless of the weather conditions.
A wet night is scarcely unknown in the western country, but the veils of rain spread across the pitch could mean a dark and murky horror. It was certainly an evening to test the resilience of the Dyson patent, with prices ranging from £89 to £59 for the inexorable privilege.
It was also quickly becoming apparent that Storm Darragh was not the only unbearable force heading the way to Bath. Hoping to use his strong shot as a battering ram, the visitors managed to get two noises on the board within the first 26 minutes, first from their own forward Oscar Jegou and then Reda Ward’s lip, after a long drive that had Bath’s. forward backpedaling stretched their 22
Despite La Rochelle’s winning domestic form, their confidence was visibly growing, as was perfectly illustrated by the third test.
Despite a far from a-sympathetic delivery from the line, their Kiwi scrum-half Tawera Kerr-Barlow pulled the ball out of his fingers as if he were walking into a hot midday summer gully and pulled it past the cover of the ground. excellently for every twenty
With West kicking all three conversions, Ruppella had gone 21-6 by the half hour mark, the kind of advantage that good sides rarely squander.
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Nor did it help Bath’s cause when their first attacking position before the interval was wasted by a lineout which ended with the visitors conceding a penalty short of a late penalty.
It was going to take something special to overturn a 15 point deficit with the conditions now mostly at the back of the visitors. And seven minutes after the restart, a glimmer of hope duly materialized when the Bath club sent a tunnel goal through Tom Dunn and Finn Russell curled in a beautiful conversion to add to the first two penalties of the half.
The game then took a dramatic turn when Kerr-Barlow, looking to recover a go-ahead kick from the excellent Guy Pepper, didn’t clear the ball in goal and Quinn Roux was adjudged to have touched it in the first place. The evidence wasn’t entirely conclusive either way, but Russell’s sudden conversion made it a one-point game nonetheless. Can they possibly complete a stunning comeback? West’s 58th minute penalty made the task a little more difficult, but, despite a nervous moment or two, Ruppella’s big beasts had the final say.