Seconds earlier it had been Quins with a chance to score having set up an attacking lineout on the Bath 5 metre line. However, for the second time in the match, Bath stole the ball and this time they raced the length of the pitch and though that incision didn’t produce a try immediately, a couple of phases saw them put Daniel Browne in. Fortunately Butch James, in his new Robbie Williams/Will Greenwood tribute lemon crop, missed the conversion and that set the stage for a fantastic Quins charge.

Against collectively the largest team I think I’ve ever seen, Quins consistently dumped bigger men back in the tackle and proved that collective effort and desire counts for more than brute bulk. The pack, led by the increasingly immense Skinner, rarely gave Bath an inch.

And boy are Bath giants. As they brought on more and more replacements in the second half, if anything their beef quotient got larger and larger. There is clearly no food shortage around the Rec. They were a big side last year but they seem to have grown by another 10%.

Perhaps the heavy going under foot started to count against the heavier men, though — even as they used all seven of their replacements to Quins’ two. Banahan looks dangerous if he gets up a head of speed but it takes him several yards to get rumbling and Quins regularly swarmed around him before he could find second gear.

Tackle of the match though, came when one of the Bath behemoths (sorry I’m not sure who) broke through and lined up Evans, our last man in defence, surely sniffing the tryline. No disrespect to certain other Quins No.10s of recent years but I don’t think many of them would have put in the tackle which he produced. Evans sized up his man and ran at him with a textbook hit, low and certain, and he was down. Never was ‘the bigger they come the harder they fall’ a more apt expression. Skinner and co, as usual, tore into the breakdown and the threat was gone.

Another word on Evans, who to utter disbelief all round, missed a penalty in front of the posts in the first half, and another trickier effort later on. He has the extra split second of time on the ball which marks out the special player from the merely very good. Also his certainty of purpose in his decision making is great to watch. Given the choice of run, pass, or kick, he knows exactly what he wants to do and many more tries are surely going to come from his backline this season as a result.

It was an Evans pass which gave Jordan Turner-Hall the chance to barrel over the Bath line and bring the scores level on 64 minutes. Evans add the two points and then The Stoop held its breath to see what would happen next as the game could still clearly have gone either way.

Wonderfully it was Quins who showed the greater desire and wit to go and win the match. A tap and go from Guest, who was in top form again, drove the ball close and then after a couple more rucks, Gomarsall picked, went, looked left and while almost 12,000 people looked left with him, craftily slipped the ball inside to Ceri Jones who blasted over to prompt a huge Stoop roar.

Gomarsall was clearly delighted by his sleight of hand and produced a little dance in the centre of the pitch to celebrate the vital score. Given that he’d been dumped on the ground in the first minute, and needed extensive attention to get him back in action, it was no small triumph.

A couple of dodgy passes, aside, Gomarsall had another excellent game, driving the team on, geeing up the crowd, and, if he’d had his legs of a few years ago, his interception in the first half would have produced an earlier try for Quins. The chasers caught him and his pass to Stegmann was perhaps a little too late and the winger could not finish off the score, though an Evans penalty did come from the attack.

All round this was a high quality team effort against a monstrous (in the best sense of the word) Bath team who have led the league up to today. With Irish, Sale and Gloucester all winning, the top of the table is getting even more congested perhaps than last year. This was a must win match if Quins wanted to stay in the play-off hunt, and they didn’t disappoint.

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