‘It‘s not about killing and attacking everything’: Why Bristol have become the bears according to Pat Lam

Championship winners Bristol have no intention of simply making up the numbers in next season’s Premiership, with head coach Pat Lam insisting winning England’s top flight at the first attempt is within reach of the team recently rebranded as the Bears.

As Bristol approach the last match of their title-winning campaign away to Hartpury this weekend, Lam was asked how long he thought it would take to win the Premiership.

“There’s no point being in it if you don’t have an ambition to win it,” replies the hugely-experienced former Samoa back-rower who won a surprise Pro12 title with Connacht in his most recent coaching role before arriving at Bristol in June 2017. “I believe all 12 of the clubs in the Premiership have the opportunity to win it.

“No one at the start of this season expected to see Harlequins and Northampton down the bottom of the Premiership. Likewise, Newcastle and Sale have stepped up and they are going really well. You’re trying to give yourself the best possible chance by having good recruitment and by having a very good rugby programme, and once that all comes together, you increase the chance. You don’t focus on winning it, you focus on becoming better each day.

“I wasn’t too pleased we had been relegated when I joined Bristol, but it’s been a real blessing in disguise in that we’ve been able to implement a lot of things to get us ready.”

Lam’s team have won 20 of their 21 Championship matches since dropping out of the Premiership last summer and now they have made a whopping 18 new signings, headlined by marquee full-back Charles Piutau from Ulster and tighthead prop John Afoa from Gloucester, who will both start work at their new club on 1 July, while others begin pre-season training on 28 May.

Last time round in the Premiership, under former boss Andy Robinson, the Ashton Gate club lost their opening 10 league matches before a win over Worcester on Boxing Day, 2016.

Lam, 49, has recruited his old mucker John Muldoon from Connacht as defence coach, and two of the incoming players – lock Aly Muldowney and back-rower Jake Heenan – also played for the Irish province who traded on a backwoodsmen, underdog tag.

But Lam mistrusts terms such as “underdog” or “favourite”, preferring “hard work and preparation” as Bristol return to England’s elite under their much-discussed ursine insignia.

“I was talking to someone watching training recently,” Lam recalls, “and they said ‘jeez, it’s fast, the intensity and stuff’ and I said ‘yeah, we’re playing Nottingham this week but if we were playing Saracens or Bath it wouldn’t be anything different’.

“When we talk about John Muldoon, and Jake Heenan is coming over, and Aly Muldowney is coming from Grenoble, it’s no different from Charles Piutau or [Bristol’s existing All Black forward] Steven Luatua, or John Afoa – these are guys I have worked with before and that gives me an insight into their character and how professional they are.

“Yeah, everyone talks about the name players. But some of these name players cost a lot of money. So we’re constantly asking ourselves ‘where does this player fit?’ Is he going up the mountain, or coming down the mountain, can he contribute on and off the field?

“Steven Luatua and Charles Piutau haven’t won a Championship or a Premiership before. So it’s about the team system and the rugby programme we have, and you bring the right individuals that can help you. When I interview them and meet them, I find out what their dreams and aspirations are. And then I let them know the dreams and aspirations of Bristol Rugby. And on the back of that, if it’s aligned, we can start the negotiation process. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter how good the player is, we shake hands and the conversation ends and you wish them well.”

Not every Bristol supporter has greeted the ‘Bears’ idea well, and a fans’ forum last Thursday was almost entirely taken up by the subject rather than the playing prospects.

But Lam reveals the brand and the squad’s potential are more intertwined than the publicity has made clear.

“We’ll always be Bristol Rugby,” he says, “but with the brand we’re going through, as Bristol Bears, when Steve [Lansdown, the club owner] spoke to me about it, the first thing I wanted to know is ‘why?’ That’s exactly the way I work and the way I expect the players and staff to work, as well. Anything we do, it’s important to explain the ‘why’.

“As Steve talked about the qualities of the bear, it resonated perfectly with me, when we’re talking about what we’re trying to do with the players here – the work that we do in the community, the work the boys do in the schools, the hospitals, the work they do with each other. We want them to be good partners, as men growing up as well, and good fathers.

“When we looked at the quality of the bear, it’s not about ‘kill everything and attack everything’. When it needs to, it will – it has that power and the strength. But on the other side of it too, it will defend its own, it cares about where it is, the community and so forth. So the qualities of the bear resonated perfectly with everything we’re trying to do here in our rugby programme. And as we explained it to the players and the staff, they were 100 per cent behind it.”

open image in gallery

Lam has also coached the Auckland province and the Super-Rugby Blues in New Zealand, and as an assistant with Scotland, and he does not believe the current woes of Quins or Northampton make them any more catchable than the likes of Exeter or Saracens. “When a team goes through adversity, there’s an opportunity to get some serious growth,” he says. “I knew that coming into here as well. There’s been adversity here.

“Everybody will start from scratch again. There’s a lot of players in the Premiership that weren’t there last year, that people are now talking about, and we can be the same.

“We have got a new state-of-the-art training facility being built, one of the best in the country [at Abbots Leigh to the west of Bristol, with the aim of moving in by December 2019]. And when you ask about the impact, we’ve got record season tickets going out for the amount of time; we’ve got a younger crowd.

“I’m just excited that Bristol Rugby is part of it, because there is such passion in the south-west [of England], and I knew that from my time when I played here. There’s a lot of proud supporters. Our main thing is to ensure we get everything right so we give our supporters something to be extremely proud about.”