Following a 32-14 win for Montpellier over Bath at the Recreation Ground, here’s our five takeaways from the Investec Champions Cup fixture.
The top line
A week after shipping 71 at DPD Franklin’s Gardens, Bath came to the Rec needing a response and for 50 minutes they had one; they led 14-10 at the break through Ollie Lawrence and a quite brilliant Arthur Green, they’d held a Montpellier side that had most of the ball to a single try, and the all-Scottish contest at fly-half was going Finn Russell’s way. However, they then spent the last half hour handing the game to a side that lives off exactly that sort of generosity, and Montpellier went home with a four-try bonus point and a 32-14 win that flattered nobody.
Four Bath scores were chalked off or dropped. Lawrence put a foot in touch gathering Santiago Carreras’s chip inside the first five minutes; Joe Cokanasiga dropped the ball a metre short under the posts on 43 with the line wide open, after Ben Spencer had tapped a scrum free-kick and Russell and Carreras had done the rest; Josh Bayliss went over on 69 only for a Ted Hill neck roll at the ruck before it to take the try off; and Russell’s deliberate knock-on five metres out on 74 gave Montpellier the position from which Alexandre Bécognée finished them. Put bluntly, that’s the second week running that Bath’s error count has beaten Bath, and it’s now a question for Johann van Graan rather than one bad night.
Montpellier, for their part, were everything the Top 14’s best defence and lowest turnover count said they’d be. Stuart Hogg scored on 12 minutes after a long, patient phase count off a corner lineout, Donovan Taofifenua twice in the second half, the first on 48 minutes after Yacouba Camara had broken through the middle and Adam Hastings and Dimitri Delibes had made the extra man, the second a 60-metre intercept off a Russell pass thrown under pressure on his own 10 metre line, and that man Bécognée, deservedly man of the match, closed it out on 77 minutes whilst Hastings added 10 points from the tee.
Self-inflicted
The possession figures tell you how this was lost. Bath had 66 per cent of the ball in the second half and were outscored 18-0 in it; Montpellier made 165 tackles to Bath’s 92 and missed eight to Bath’s 24, and the home side lost eight of their 64 rucks whilst Montpellier lost one in 80. Nine or 10 times, depending on how you count, Montpellier won the ball on the floor, and that’s the pre-match wisdom many got wrong, because the numbers said MHR had no specialist over the ball. Yet Bécognée alone took it off Bath five times, Justo Piccardo three times from inside centre, and Lyam Akrab, the only uncapped man in the Montpellier pack and a hooker who’ll surely be capped this season, was all over it too.
Then there was the set-piece. Beno Obano went at the scrum on 32 and Hastings took the three; Will Stuart had a proper job done on him by Reda Wardi on the other side; and when Bath finally earned a penalty to the corner on 54, they threw the lineout straight to Camara. Add the Hill penalty at the ruck that handed Montpellier the Bath 10 metre line on 65, the fumble in their own half on 75 that Montpellier turned over and kicked to the corner, and the offside that followed, and you have a side that made the best defence in France look like the combined forces of Saladin’s Army.
Sure, Bath’s red-zone efficiency is usually among the best in the Prem, but on Saturday Montpellier’s defence had as much to do with the shortfall as Bath’s hands did. The flat, aggressive line of 14 with Hogg sweeping behind was the same wall Toulouse couldn’t break in last season’s Top 14 final, and Bath’s answers to it were clever, chips and grubbers in behind to draw the line and go over it, and a pattern of hitting the short side at the slower defenders before bringing the pace on the third phase coming back open; it got them the Lawrence and Green tries, but once Montpellier had read the short-side pattern the third phase was arriving into a set line rather than a tired one, and the chips started finding Hogg.
The back-row
Man for man, Montpellier’s back-row had the better of Bath’s, Green excepted. Camara broke the Bath line through the middle for the first Taofifenua try and was the man on the loose ball more than once; Lenni Nouchi, back after the orange card that ended his night against Toulon, carried hard off the back of the scrum for the exits and spent the last two minutes of the first half camped on the Bath line; and Bécognée had the kind of night a seven dreams about, five turnovers and the try that put the game away, and the award went to him rather than to the fly-half who speaks English and kicked 10 points, which doesn’t always happen when TV directors run the show. Guy Pepper, the player the scouting said would feast on a Montpellier breakdown with no fetcher in it, had a poor match by his own standards, and Hill’s neck roll cost his side a try.
Arthur Green
Here’s the one Bath take home. Green, 22, six foot and 105 kilos, a Frome boy by way of Sherborne and Durham, was the best player in blue, black and white by a distance: 11 carries, the most in the match alongside Piccardo, three clean breaks, three defenders beaten and 44 metres. His short ball from Russell on 19 took him through the line and into scramble before Russell spun it wide for Lawrence, and his try on 25, pick, show, dummy and over from a ruck under the posts, sold Ali Price a kipper from five metres out.
That’s the best piece of number eight skill the Rec has seen since Taulupe Faletau was here, and he’d been outstanding at the Gardens last week too, so it’s form rather than a one-off. The Alfie Barbeary comparison will follow him around but it isn’t quite the right one; Barbeary had more raw power, whereas Green is the more complete player, and he’s doing it at a size that would’ve made him an openside 10 years ago. Dan Frost, on for Tom Dunn on 55, is the same story from the other end, all the skills and a frame about 15 per cent short of a Test hooker’s.
The 50 to 70
We know that statistically Montpellier are the strongest side in the Top 14 in the window after the hour, Toulouse apart, and that their power doesn’t drop when the bench arrives. Saturday did nothing to dent that. Bastien Chalureau made way for Adam Beard at the start of the second half, Nouchi for Billy Vunipola on 52, and between the 48th and 77th minutes Montpellier scored 22 unanswered points; Taofifenua’s two, Hastings’s second penalty on 55 and Bécognée’s try all came in a window where Bath had two-thirds of the ball.
Vunipola, in fairness, dropped the loose ball that gave Bayliss his chalked-off try, and there was a theory doing the rounds at the Rec that he’d been sent on to give Bath a chance, but the bench as a whole made the difference and the plan was exactly the one we expected, stay in it to 50 and then change the game. Bath’s bench, Frost apart, made little dent on it, and Russell, the better of the two Scottish 10s for 50 minutes, finished with two penalties, a handling error and the intercept pass against his name.
Montpellier leave with five points and a defence that conceded two tries to a side with two-thirds of the second-half ball, and the next time anyone writes that they lack a fetcher, Bécognée’s name should be put in front of them. Bath have Gloucester at Kingsholm in six days, a Premiership record against them from last week and a Champions Cup campaign that already needs rescuing, and on this evidence the review on Monday starts at the ruck, where they lost eight of their own, and not with the attack, which made the chances and then dropped them.
READ MORE: Bath v Montpellier: Result, scorers, match stats, line-ups