All aboard for glory? Bath hope their trophy buses are finally on schedule
Trophies,They are like bloody buses,Or at least that is what Bath fans must be hoping,They wait 17 years for one, and along come …We are about to find out how many,One has just been.
The Premiership Cup pulled up in March to fairly inconsequential fanfare.But it looks as if another, the Challenge Cup, is waiting just a stop away, before we turn our attention to a third, the Premiership, timetabled for the middle of June – but you know what these bloody buses are like.Bath journey to Cardiff on Friday in an attempt to catch the next one.They qualified for the Challenge Cup by being jettisoned from the Champions, but they have fairly blitzed their way to the final, where they will meet Lyon.The last trophy Bath won, before the reserves triumphed in March, is, as it happens, the Challenge Cup, all those 17 years ago, when they beat Worcester in the 2008 final in a downpour at Kingsholm on a Sunday afternoon.
That, in turn, was the first piece of silverware the club had won in 10 years, since they became champions of Europe in 1998, at the tail end of an era in which those buses came regularly and on cue,No one can move very far in rugby these days without someone mentioning the phrase “this club’s DNA”, but in the case of Bath the double helix is shot through with the legacy of glory,Even if one has to have been born in the 80s to have any chance of remembering it, the echoes of those years when Bath were the champions of everything in English rugby ring throughout the old walls of Aquae Sulis,What must that do to a club, as they wander all but trophy-less in the years to follow,Sam Underhill was born a few months after Bath’s last English title, in 1996, the year they also won the cup, back when it was rugby’s equivalent of the FA Cup, rather than the squad-building exercise during the Six Nations it is now.
It was Bath’s 10th cup in 13 years, their sixth title in eight, their fourth double.Underhill has endured with the others the barren years, since he joined in 2017, but he senses a shift in the current squad’s approach, wrought by Johann van Graan, Bath’s South African director of rugby over the past three seasons.Van Graan believes in “the process”, not the result – the bus ride, if you like, over the destination.“You’re not doing things because it’s the right moment to do them,” says Underhill.“You’re doing them because it’s the right thing to do.
It becomes a sort of self-fulfilling cycle.”Certainly, any focus on results in the past few decades would have brought Bath little but anguish, all the more so given that pedigree.So maybe this focus on process is all for the better.The season before Van Graan took over, Bath finished bottom of the Premiership, shipping 70 points at home to Saracens in October and losing 64-0 at Gloucester six months later.A nadir, even by recent standards.
Since then, the journey has been steadily upwards – mid-table in Van Graan’s first season and runners-up last year, his second, when an early red card in the final did its best to corrupt those processes.A good time to put the contingency of outcomes to the back of one’s mind.When Bath won at Pau in the round of 16, Underhill was sent off himself, early in the second half, by Hollie Davidson.She will be officiating again on Friday, the first woman to referee a European cup final and the first Scot since Jim Fleming took the whistle in, you guessed it, 1998, when Bath beat Brive to become European champions.Red cards are never far away in rugby these days, but the philosophy of Van Graan inures his players to such accidents of fate.
“I don’t put too much stock into how things go,” says Underhill.“If you worry too much about the outcome, you end up trying to catch smoke.You just chase it, chase it, and the more you try, the further away you get.”Sign up to The RecapThe best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend’s actionafter newsletter promotionFor those less focused on process, a casual glance at the English and French tables might suggest a happy outcome for Bath on Friday night.Lyon languish in the lower reaches of the Top 14, after three consecutive defeats; Bath have top spot in the Premiership regular season sewn up already.
But such is the Zen at the Rec, hankering after anything so vulgar as results is off limits.And the fans are onside – even those old enough to remember you know when.“You want to give people good experiences,” says Underhill.“And that doesn’t always mean winning trophies.It goes back to not worrying so much about outcomes.
It’s not quite as straightforward as the fans will be happy if we win trophies and incredibly upset if we don’t.Hopefully, there’s a level of appreciation in the process and the people.”Stop looking and you will find it, seems to be the gist of it.Buses never stop when you run after them, as Bath know only too well.
UK private sector shrinking as firms cut jobs; pressure to raise taxes as government borrowing jumps – as it happened
Britain’s private sector is shrinking for the second month running as factory output falls at the fastest rate in a year and a half, a new survey shows.The latest poll of purchasing managers at UK companies found that private sector output is decreasing in May, although at a slower rate than in April.Manufacturing production fell at the fastest rate since October 2023, although this was moderated by a “fractional rise” in service sector output.UK firms reported that clients were cautious this month, due to business uncertainty, leading to a drop in new orders. However, worries about US tariffs have dropped this month, after Donald Trump delayed tariffs on America’s trading partners and agreed a trade deal with the UK
UK petrol prices poised to fall further as oil prices tumble
Global oil prices have tumbled by more than $1 a barrel in a sign that pressure on households at the petrol pumps could ease further.The price of Brent crude fell to $63.86 a barrel on Thursday following reports that the Opec oil cartel and its allies may increase their production for July, despite weaker global demand for fossil fuels.The price of crude is now well below the $80.53 a barrel average recorded last year, a fall that has helped to put pump prices at their lowest level in almost four years
OpenAI buys iPhone architect’s startup for $6.4bn
OpenAI is buying an untested startup for $6.4bn, the ChatGPT maker’s biggest acquisition yet. The hardware startup, called io, was founded by Apple design guru Jony Ive, known best as one of the principal architects of the iPhone. Ive and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said in a blog post that their partnership has been two years in the making.“A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition,” they wrote in the blog post, which offered scant details on upcoming devices
Scattered Spider is focus of NCA inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers
A hacker community known as Scattered Spider is a key suspect in a criminal inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers including Marks & Spencer, detectives have said.Scattered Spider, a loose collective of native English-speaking cybercriminals, has been strongly linked with hacks against M&S, the Co-op and Harrods. M&S said on Wednesday it will take an estimated £300m hit to profits after its systems were hacked last month.The UK’s National Crime Agency, whose remit includes combating cybercrime, said the group was a focus in its investigations.“We are looking at the group that is publicly known as Scattered Spider, but we’ve got a range of different hypotheses and we’ll follow the evidence to get to the offenders,” Paul Foster, the head of the NCA’s national cybercrime unit, told the BBC
England v Zimbabwe: men’s cricket Test, day one – live
66th over: England 369-2 (Pope 85, Root 1) You’re a highly inexperienced touring team. You’ve finally managed to take a second wicket. And who do you find coming in? Joe Root. He gets off the mark with a dab on the off side.Crawley sweeps, misses and is given out! It looks pretty plumb
Scientists rubbish Enhanced Games’ claims that doping causes no harm
Enhanced Games competitors run the risk of their libido being “killed off” as well as a greater chance of heart attacks and psychiatric issues by taking performance enhanced drugs, leading experts have warned.Prof Ian Broadley, whose research has been supported by the World Anti-Doping Agency, and his colleague Martin Chandler, a research fellow who specialises in PEDs, also told the Guardian that organisers’ claims that banned drugs can be made safer if taken under medical supervision are “incorrect and misleading”.Organisers of the Enhanced Games revealed on Wednesday that they will stage a four-day event in Las Vegas next year, but confirmed that they had already given the Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev $1m for dipping under the 50 metre freestyle world record time by using banned drugs.Meanwhile the Australian former Olympic swimmer, James Magnussen, has said that he “feels like 18 again” after taking testosterone, peptides and banned drugs, including BPC-157, CJC-1295 and the growth hormone ipamorelin to prepare for the event.However, Boardley and Chandler have warned that Magnussen and other Enhanced Games competitors are underestimating the risks and dangers from taking steroids and other experimental drugs
Extra cancer scans for women with dense breasts could save 700 lives a year – UK study
‘It’s all people wanted to talk about’: How Labour U-turned on winter fuel payment cut
More community sentences in England and Wales could be ‘catastrophic’, warns watchdog
It’s not ‘grit’ that children lack, but proper support | Letters
Texas model cuts costs and prison numbers | Letters
Britain should adopt the Passivhaus standard to cut energy costs in new homes | Letters