We only went and sodding nilled them, didn’t we?
Let’s put that in context: we nilled a team that has taken a try bonus point from all eight games this this season. That’s an average of 5½ per game, against every other team in the Premiership. And we nilled them.
I’ll admit it: I was sitting in front of the telly at sixteen minutes to eight, bricking it. All I could think was “Please don’t let it be a trouncing”. Oh, ye of little faith… (In my defence, previous scores of 40-13, 47-17 and 45-26 didn’t inspire high confidence.)
But isn’t it a nice feeling towards the end of a match to be thinking, not “Can we stop them from getting the try bonus/losing bonus/win?” but, rather, “Can we stop them from getting anything at all?”
Last week, I said of this game:
This will be a good test of our revamped defence: and that’s what has been our biggest weapon against them. It’s what failed last January, when we were in the doldrums but it’s what beat them at their place earlier that season.
I could have added that starving them of space and time is pretty much how we’ve beaten them all nine times home and away so far.
So, there I was at kick-off, heart thumping, apprehensive, ready to find solace in my glass of Stubborn Mule Chocolate Stout (and possibly something stronger, later). Two minutes later, the dog is hiding under the sofa and my wife is reflecting on having married a madman.
An innocuous lineout a few metres inside the Bristol half, a slightly wayward pass to Raffi, making it slightly harder for him to pass it on to George or Rob, a gap in the defensive line…
That is what Raffi brings to Sale’s game: the speed of thought to pounce on those split-second errors in the defence. As I said last week, he and Gus have complementary games; Gus is steadier but less inclined to test the fringe defence; Raffi is a bit more impulsive: high risk, high reward. Horses for courses – we’re lucky to have the two of them and we need to keep them both.
So, we were now seven-nil up (thanks to a brilliant touch-line conversion by Rob) and Bristol were already wondering what was going on. But those of us who are seasoned watchers of Sale knew to temper our excitement, lest it prove premature. There were, after all, another seventy-seven minutes to go.
And caution in breaking open the Champers seemed justified seven minutes in, when Luke James went off holding his arm. It looked to be a hyper-extension of the elbow, so we hope that means it’s not a long-term injury.
Meanwhile, Bristol had gone off-feet at a ruck, allowing Rob to increase the lead to ten points.
So there we were, eight minutes in, ten-nil up and Bristol looking as if the director had rewritten the script without telling them. Could it last?
It lasted another ten minutes, at least. From a Sale line-out in the Bristol 22, Dickie was chasing a grubber down the touchline. That he didn’t quite get to it was entirely down to Harry Randall hanging off his shirt. Cue a Sale penalty and a ten-minute rest for Mr Randall. Two minutes later, after battering the Bristol line for ten phases, Ford hoicks a pass out right to Buck, in acres of space. Try number two, a cracking conversion and it’s suddenly seventeen points and Bristol are starting to look as if they’ve been hit by a truck.
Or, rather, found themselves continually running into a wall made of orange bricks. Try as they might, they could not string a series of passes together. Such was Sale’s line speed, Bristol always looked rushed, passes went astray, ball carriers fumbled the ball and, always, they lost ground with each phase.
In desperation, Worsley attempted a drop goal – just to get something on the board – but it went wide. Then, a few minutes before half-time, Ford showed him how it’s done by slotting a drop goal of his own to take us into the break twenty-nil up.
I assume at least some of Pat Lam’s half-time talk centred around the need to score first in the second half, so it must have been frustrating when they coughed up a kickable penalty less than a minute after the restart. Twenty-three-nil. Apparently, Sale have never lost from such a margin; a statistic which, if true, does rather surprise me.
One of the things that the pundits frequently raise about Bristol is their willingness to run the ball from anywhere, including their own twenty-two or even goal area. One of the things that the pundits rarely mention is the inherent risks involved in making a habit of running the ball from your own twenty-two. Case in point: there they were, dicking about trying to find a way through a defence that they hadn’t been able to breach in the last fifty-odd minutes; one telegraphed pass later and they’re now thirty points behind. I doubt Ben will ever score an easier try.
Maybe Bristol need to reflect on the wisdom of occasionally ditching the flash and taking a pragmatic approach.
Like Sale, at the sixty-minute mark, going for goal following yet another Bristol infringement. You might have thought, “We’re thirty points up with three tries; go for the corner and the bonus point”. Or, your reasoning might have gone: “We’ve got twenty minutes left to get the bonus point; meanwhile, they’re clearly rattled and here’s a relatively easy chance to turn the screw even harder”. Reader, we turned the screw…
About five minutes later, Bristol had finally managed to mount a serious attack into Sale’s twenty-two and had forced a penalty five metres out. They went for the tap but, instead of keeping it in the forwards, tried to pass it out wide and buggered it up. The ball went to ground, Flats picked it up and set off on an eighty-odd metre sprint to the other end.
[Memories: Edgeley Park and Jos Baxendell similarly gathering a loose ball and setting off, visibly trying to force his legs to keep pumping; or Seb Chabal at Parc des Princes running half the length of the pitch to score and immediately collapsing in a heap.]
Flats, fortunately, had Raffi to back him up and take the pass and the defenders before handing it back for the score in the corner.
Thirty-eight points to none and my thoughts had moved on from “Can we beat them?” to “Can we nil them?” The team must have been having similar thoughts: why else would they, with fifteen seconds to go, be defending their line as if it was a one-point game? Keeping this much-vaunted, free-scoring team pointless must have been such a morale-boosting effort.
So there you have it: the team that has scored 309 points and 44 tries in just eight games… nilled at home.
(Now, if you’ll all just excuse me for a moment…
🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️🤣️
… that’s better. Sorry, where were we?)
I’m not going to single anyone out this week because that was probably as close to the perfect team performance as you’ll ever see.
I think just about everyone has referred to this as a defensive masterclass and you really do have to re-watch it to get everything that happened. The speed off the line, the way they shut down options, and the scramble on the rare occasion that Bristol did break through (Ben Curry beating their winger to the ball — priceless). Watch again again and see how, at every phase, Bristol had gone backwards. There’s a particularly memorable one in the second half, where they had a ruck about a metre from Sale’s line. Three or four phases later, they were outside the twenty-two. Astonishing defence.
And four tries into the bargain, despite the attack not being particularly hot (certainly not in comparison to the defence). Two of the tries were pretty much opportunistic: Ben spotting the pass and Flats pouncing on the loose ball. Even Raffi’s try: had Dickie given him a better pass, that try wouldn’t have been scored. As it was, the pass was loose, Raffi had to juggle it, so couldn’t pass it on but did see the gap in the defence and went for it.
That’s not to say that Sale’s offensive game was lacking, just that – even in the face of four tries – it’s not what we’ll remember from that game.
Here’s a couple of stats that might bring the magnitude of that performance into perspective:
Bristol made 297 metres from 148 (one hundred and forty-eight) carries; that’s about two metres per carry. Sale, in contrast, made 346 metres from just 82 carries (just over four metres per carry). Bristol conceded twenty-one turnovers to Sale’s ten and only won three to Sale’s eleven. Sale made 166 tackles to Bristol’s 89.
That was a game that will go down in the annals…
…But now we need to follow it up.
It was a significant win – a statement of intent – and it will be fondly remembered for years to come but it has to now be backed up away at Gloucester.
Time to patch up those bruised bodies and do it all again, this time with the added joys of a plastic pitch. Will George be able to play? Is it worth risking his knee on an artificial surface? We saw what the loss of an influential playmaker did to Bristol; at least we have Rob to take over the reins.
SAMP™ has us down for a one-point defeat, 25-24. I think we can do better than that.
Last year, at approximately this time, we lost to Bristol at home and Gloucester away. Those two defeats were probably the lowest point of last season but look where we ended up. If we can reverse those two results, just think where we could be come May…
an old grey dog 