By Glen Leat
May 20 2003

Last week I was asked by the Bath Chronicle to write their weekly "Soapbox" article. I used this opportunity to remind the owners of Bath Rugby what is important to those of us who see our club as more than a product to be sold on the market. I've copied the article here in case you missed it. The last few weeks has been a nightmare for Bath Rugby supporters; no not the possibility of relegation from the Premiership but all this talk of a merger with the Bristol Shoguns. On-field disappointments I can cope with because that is the nature of sport, but the off-field antics of some club owners I can do without.

Of course off-field problems are not new to Bath, I remember the days when we were an amateur club and each year the Members would gather and bicker about mind-blowing topics such as the state of the women’s toilets, whether women should be allowed on the Management Committee and the always contentious club accounts.

However in 1996 the biggest issue to be debated by the Members was whether to embrace professionalism and change from Bath FC to Bath Rugby. It was a difficult decision for most but when the club captain at the time stood up and told us that if we opted to retain our amateur status the top players would leave Bath and play for any club that would pay them we knew there was no option – we had to sell out to the money men.

Players who had previously played for Bath purely for the honour of representing the most successful English club side in modern rugby were now being paid handsomely for their efforts and this was fine to start with until we started to lose more games than we won. Is it a co-incidence that our last Championship winning season was the one before professionalism started or that our winning percentage was 83% in 1996 but for the last two seasons that win rate has dropped to 31%?

Yes we may have won the European Cup in 1998 but we also lost nine league matches that year and finished sixth the following year. This Cup triumph was a very thin veneer covering some deep cracks that would widen over the following seasons.

Mike Catt recently commented that Bath Rugby needs a change at the top and he may be right, however, rather than just blaming the management for our current plight I would equally call to account the players who demanded inflated and sometimes undeserved salaries. Rugby as a whole never could and never will be able to sustain the wage bills currently paid by our clubs.

So as we are left wondering about the possibility of a management change at Bath Rugby I hope that whoever is in charge in the future understands that the club must aim for a better balance between the needs of a sports club, its supporters and a commercial business . Also the club must recognise that Bath supporters are not just customers buying a product who will go elsewhere if dissatisfied. Supporting Bath Rugby is a passionate, tribal affair of the heart which lasts a lifetime and unless the new management understand this they will never fully embrace the ethos of Bath Rugby.