Sam Burgess: Bath head coach Mike Ford said ex-England centre 'didn't have the stomach' to fight for a place in union

The Sam Burgess affair – English rugby’s version of a West End farce, with an entire cast of red-faced characters running around in a state of trouserless embarrassment – took another bitterly amusing turn yesterday when the Bath club responded in no uncertain terms to the league specialist’s parting shot at the union code. Burgess may be back in Australia with his kith and kin, but his ears would have been burning even if he had bought himself a one-way ticket to Mars instead.

Both the Bath head coach Mike Ford and his son George, who played alongside Burgess during England’s benighted World Cup campaign, reacted fiercely to the Yorkshireman’s departure from the Recreation Ground, one year into a three-year deal. Ford the elder, who had just completed the signing of the Scotland No 8 David Denton as a direct result of losing his highest-paid player, said Bath were “stronger this week than we were last week because we’re better off having someone who wants to be here”, while Ford the younger, the best outside-half in the country and therefore a decent judge of a player, was even less inclined to sing his one-time club-mate’s praises.

“I thought Sam was going to come back to the club – to stick it out, to have a go, to get his head down,” he said. “We’re really disappointed. Massively disappointed. He signed a three-year deal and you know what you’re doing when you agree to something like that. You commit to the club and to the players, to the staff and to the supporters. There are lads here who would die for the club, who have sacrificed a lot for it – and sacrificed a lot for Sam too, committing to him and putting time and effort into making him the player he was at the back end of last season, when he made it into the World Cup squad.

“Nothing ever gets given to you in this game and nothing is ever easy. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Things take time: to become a world-class union player you have to put in the hard graft. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a case of whether you want to do it or not.”

Highly paid as a newspaper columnist as well as in every other respect, Burgess had taken to the public prints to explain the thinking behind his abrupt return to rugby league with the South Sydney Rabbitohs. He said his heart was in league rather than union, that he intended to settle in New South Wales with his Australian fiancée and start a family, that he felt he was fighting a losing battle in union against growing numbers of critics.

But what really got the goat of his former colleagues in the West Country was his implication that he did not want to spend the next 18 months learning the blind-side flanker role at Bath without the “excitement” of playing for England. “In sport, we have a very limited window in which to compete at the top level,” he said.

That remark was almost as flabbergasting as the assumption, made by too many top-class coaches taking too great a leave of their senses, that Burgess could turn himself into a Test-class union midfielder in the blink of an eye and be worthy of a World Cup place. Mike Ford, one of those guilty of lauding Burgess to the rooftops this time last year, was significantly less enthusiastic yesterday. “This was the time for him to roll up his sleeves and become the player I thought he could be,” said the former England defence coach. “He chose not to do so. All I know is that he didn’t have the stomach to see out his contract.”

Denton, a seriously good back-row forward blessed with the advantage of actually understanding the complexities of the union game, will head south from Edinburgh later this week. Bath have no intention of handing him a debut in Sunday’s European Champions Cup opener with the holders Toulon in France, but he is likely to play a part against Leinster at the Rec in 10 days’ time.

It was quite a day for harsh words, all things considered. The Harlequins full-back Mike Brown, one of England’s more passionate performers at the World Cup, expressed his disgust at the decision of some of his colleagues, hiding as ever behind the cloak of anonymity, to criticise various aspects of the red-rose production. “The trust has gone now as far as I’m concerned,” he remarked, with total justification. “I don’t think anyone was good enough in an England shirt to be piping up and saying ‘this was wrong’ and ‘that was wrong’. It will make it even more difficult when we next meet up because I think the trust has been completely shot.”

Brown was supported by George Ford. “I’d probably agree with him,” the Bath man commented. “Whether the lads mean it or not, it’s out there now and it’s caused a lot of distraction. It’s all a bit messy at the moment, so I think people will be glad when the World Cup review is over, decisions are made, we all know what’s happening and we can crack on with rebuilding things.”