SO Bath won the big one against Saracens Under-12s and secured their Champions Cup qualification at the final tap of the last knockings. Some achievement, you will agree: it’s never easy to finish eighth out of 11 when the pressure is on.
We can leave to one side the debate about the Saracens selection and its brutal disfigurement of the final weekend of a campaign already bent out of shape by financial implosions. It happened, it’s over and done with, we move on.
Let’s look on the bright side instead. Bath may not have been up to much this season, but the club that gifted us a whole series of 24-carat centre partnerships – John Palmer and Jeremy Guscott, Simon Halliday and Jeremy Guscott, Phil de Glanville and Jeremy Guscott, Mike Catt and…er, um… forgotten the bloke’s name, but it may rhyme with “Guscott” – appears to be in the process of developing something similarly exciting.
Ollie Lawrence, newly anointed as the Premiership‘s best player, has the look of a World Cup midfielder about him after making the most of his England opportunities since the turn of the year. And his partner, Max Ojomoh? He may just be the man to offer something different in the problem position of inside centre – amore
interesting No.12 than the pre-programmed truck-it-up merchants who play their rugby like algorithms in shorts. Far be it from your columnist to fly in the face of modernity, but human intelligence beats the artificial variety hands down when it comes to reading a game and reacting to its shifting dynamics.
That may change with the march of technology, but as things stand, Ojomoh deserves a place in the selection conversation ahead of the global gathering in France.
