Regan's spirit drives Leeds to glory as backs betray Bath ambition

If there is plenty to say about Leeds in respect of a humble past, a triumphant present and a future of exceptional promise currently blighted by their proximity to the 12th and final place in the Premiership, there is only one thing to say about Bath and their asinine performance before a 60,000-plus Powergen Cup final audience at Twickenham. We may as well get it out of the way now. Michael Stephenson, the Newcastle wing who will join the West Countrymen next season, suffered a double fracture of his leg playing at Northampton on Friday night. Not to put too fine a point on it, he could have turned out for his new club on a stretcher and still tripled the pace of the Bath back division.

If there is plenty to say about Leeds in respect of a humble past, a triumphant present and a future of exceptional promise currently blighted by their proximity to the 12th and final place in the Premiership, there is only one thing to say about Bath and their asinine performance before a 60,000-plus Powergen Cup final audience at Twickenham. We may as well get it out of the way now. Michael Stephenson, the Newcastle wing who will join the West Countrymen next season, suffered a double fracture of his leg playing at Northampton on Friday night. Not to put too fine a point on it, he could have turned out for his new club on a stretcher and still tripled the pace of the Bath back division.

The favourites were mind-blowingly awful outside the scrum on Saturday - so awful, in fact, that while they established a 90 per cent monopoly of both possession and territory in an utterly one-sided second half, they would not have scored a try had they played for the entire duration of Stephenson's recovery. Whatever Joe Maddock and Frikkie Welsh, their imports from the southern hemisphere's Super 12 tournament, purport to be, they are not wings. Whatever value Chris Malone offers to the side, it is not as an outside-half. There were members of the Bath Under-16s team in the stadium, and to a teenager they were gob-smacked by the lack of imagination betrayed by their elders and so-called betters.

Bath have big ideas for themselves. They want to develop their council-owned Recreation Ground into a venue worthy of élite professional rugby and they are attempting to entice a very senior director of rugby - Gareth Jenkins of Llanelli is the latest buzz-name - to the club to combine the roles presently held by Jack Rowell and John Connolly, neither of whom is likely to be around next term. On the evidence of this exercise in numbskullery, Jenkins would be better off in North Korea.

Anyway, enough of the losers. This final was almost exclusively about Leeds - about the supremely efficient preparatory work of two of the most lovably enthusiastic figures in the game, Phil Davies and Jon Callard; about durable journeymen like Mike Shelley, who was turning out for the club when they were Third-Division nobodies slumming it against the Cliftons and Walsalls of this world; about ferocious point-to-prove competitors like Mark Regan; about high-class operators like Tom Palmer, who has long craved a stage of this magnitude on which to play a leading role.

Here, at long last, Palmer looked the like the player Sir Clive Woodward thought he was four years ago, when he selected him for England's development tour of North America and capped him against the United States in San Francisco. In the interim, the physics graduate went awfully quiet - too much Einstein, not enough fighting - and faded from view. On Saturday, he fairly zoomed back into focus with perhaps the most commanding display of his career, a wide-ranging contribution in which his customary athleticism at the the line-out was only a part.

"Tom needs occasions like these to show the important people what he can do," said Davies, the Welshman from Seven Sisters who played, appropriately enough, in seven cup finals for Llanelli before moving to Headingley as director of rugby in 1996. "We talked about it during the week, and Tom understood that there was no point him having this opportunity if he was going to let it pass him by. It was all up to him, and he delivered. I thought he was magnificent."

Palmer was certainly aided and abetted by the absence from the Bath pack of Steve Borthwick, his mirror image as a jumper and the conscience of his side - a man described by his regular partner, Danny Grewcock, as the "hardest-working lock in England, by a mile".

Borthwick, always struggling with shoulder trouble despite being named as captain, was ruled out on the morning of the match, and Leeds took full advantage during the opening 40 minutes by forcing Bath into the entire gamut of line-out errors.

Of course, Leeds also had to contend with their opponents' scrum, which looked as formidable as ever in the early stages. But with Regan in his pomp at hooker - the much-travelled Bristolian has never lost a game of rugby against one of his former clubs, and he did not intend to begin here against his old employers from the Rec - the Yorkshiremen gradually drew the sting from Matt Stevens and Duncan Bell. Even though they lost both Iain Balshaw, who managed to look positively lethal in the four minutes it took him to twang a thigh muscle, and the side-stepping Phil Christophers, they scored two first-half tries to open up a decisive 11-point interval lead.

The first was a beauty, Gordon Ross sliding a chip off the outside of his right boot for Chris Bell to gather and score at the sticks. The second was a complete farrago of nonsense from Bath's perspective, the hapless Malone flinging out a long cut-out pass off his right hand that was so criminally undercooked that Andre Snyman, the big Springbok, was able to intercept and rumble 80 metres to the other end of the field. Snyman is no Carl Lewis, but he was far too quick for the cement-booted opposition. The South African also contributed a magnificent tackle on Matthew Perry late in the second period, which slammed the door and turned the key on Bath .

In the thick of all this, Regan was very much in his element. He has been playing quite brilliantly in recent weeks, and had he not flounced out of the England set-up in an almighty strop back in the autumn, he would now be preparing for a second Lions tour to set alongside his trip to Springbok country eight years ago.

"Do I regret retiring from international rugby when I did? I'm not sure," he said. "I suppose I might have got the Lions trip, and I'd have loved to have gone. But I've been there and done it, haven't I? The important thing now is to enjoy the moment, have plenty to drink, get rid of the hangover and show up for work on Monday. We put ourselves at the bottom of the Premiership, so it's up to us to dig ourselves out of the crap."

That process begins against Harlequins a week tomorrow and culminates with a visit to Bath, of all places, the following Saturday. But even if Leeds fail to preserve their Premiership status, Davies is convinced they will continue as a vibrant going concern, with the All Black scrum-half Justin Marshall arriving to guide and instruct perhaps the most exciting academy players to be found anywhere in the country.

Whatever happens, they will be in better shape than the Bath back division, which officially ceased to exist on Saturday.

Bath: M Perry; J Maddock (B Daniel, 61), A Higgins, O Barkley, F Welsh; C Malone, N Walshe (M Wood, 69); M Stevens, L Mears, D Bell (D Flatman, 80), R Fidler, D Grewcock (capt), G Lewis (G Delve, 80), J Scaysbrook, I Fea'unati.

Leeds: I Balshaw (capt; D Albanese, 4); A Snyman, P Christophers (C McMullen, 29), C Bell, T Biggs; G Ross, A Dickens; M Shelley, M Regan (R Rawlinson, 73), G Kerr (M Holt, 62), S Hooper, T Palmer, S Morgan, R Parks (D Hyde, 62), A Popham (J Dunbar, 74).

Referee: D Pearson (Northumberland).