Sale Sharks v Bristol Bears: Five takeaways as self-inflicted Sharks hand Pat Lam’s Bears a bonus-point road win
Sale Sharks v Bristol Bears: Five takeaways as self-inflicted Sharks hand Pat Lam’s Bears a bonus-point road win
Following a 24-34 victory for Bristol Bears over Sale Sharks at the CorpAcq Stadium, here are our five takeaways from the opening round of the PREM.
A road win built on Sale’s mistakes
Sale ran 461 metres to Bristol’s 190, beat 27 defenders to 16, had 56 per cent of the first-half ball and scored the best try of the afternoon inside seven minutes, and they lost by ten at home with no bonus point to show for it. Bristol scored five ktries from 50 carries, took the four-try bonus, and go back down the M5 with the kind of road win that was their trademark two seasons ago and deserted them last year.
The shape of it was set early. George Ford and Bevan Rodd passed Sale into the Bristol 22 and Luke Cowan-Dickie burrowed over after Pedro Rubiolo, in his first game since January, shoved Ellis Genge off the pillar towards the blindside and left the openside guard empty; Bristol answered inside six minutes when Harry Randall’s 25-metre pass put Louis Rees-Zammit over, and again on 24 when a scrum free kick, slick hands and Tom Jordan’s pass sent Rees-Zammit in for his second.
Randall went under the posts from a collapsed maul just before the break for 20-10, and although Tom O’Flaherty’s two second-half tries kept Sale within a score, Randall’s second and Tomas Gwilliam’s maul try on 73 took the game away. Ford’s missed penalty on 78 took the losing bonus point with it.
Sara Cox and the TMO were right on the tight one, chalking off Jordan’s early try because the ball hadn’t gone into touch off a Sale player, and a long advantage played well in the second half was another credit; the hands-on-the-floor call that gave Bristol the lineout for Gwilliam’s try was the harsher decision of the day. With Gloucester winning 45-24 at Sandy Park in the afternoon, it was a round for the away sides.
Coach killers
There was a character in the 80s TV show, Minder, called Self-Inflicted Sid, played by Ronald Fraser, who’d slashed his own face to make himself look hard. He’d have been proud of this Sale performance, because every error and every penalty that cost them was self-inflicted; Bristol didn’t have to force a thing.
By the 41st minute Sale had conceded eleven penalties, and the errors ran through the side rather than sitting with one man. Ford dropped a simple pass on 27, missed touch with a penalty on 36 and was charged down after the break.
Xavier Roe, on debut, was charged down twice, threw a poor offload with the hard work of a break already done, and was penalised for going through a ruck and playing the nine, which is the one law you’d expect a scrum-half to have by heart.
Cowan-Dickie lay on the wrong side with Sale on the Bristol line; Tom Curry was pinged for a deliberate knock-on going for an intercept; Jacques Vermeulen knocked on with the ball on the floor on 61; the lineout ran at 78 per cent and lost a throw in the last quarter; and Fitz Harding stole a ruck clean off Courtney Lawes on 65. Go back through the build-up to every Bristol score and there’s a Sale hand in it somewhere.
The stat sheet tells the same story. Sale lost six rucks to Bristol’s one, conceded eight turnovers to Bristol’s two, and kicked 376 metres to Bristol’s 584 whilst carrying for 461 to 190. That’s a side that did the hard part, going forward, and then handed the ball back.
Alex Sanderson had asked his side not to ruck, moving the ball from the tackle through Rodd, Cowan-Dickie and Curry before the breakdown formed, and when it worked it produced both O’Flaherty tries; but early ball is risk as well as tempo, and O’Flaherty’s turnover for carrying too far past his support was the plan’s cost in one moment. Discipline and unforced errors killed Sale, and nothing Bristol did was as damaging as what Sale did to themselves.
Bevan Rodd’s afternoon
Rodd has always been marked down for the one thing a loosehead is supposed to do first. He carries like a back-rower and he offloads like a ten, two of them inside the opening minutes here, and the knock has been the tight. On Saturday he took George Kloska apart. The first scrum penalty came under the Bristol posts before twenty minutes, Sale went to the corner off the next one, and by the time Nicky Smith and Tomas Francis arrived as an entirely fresh front row on the hour the Bristol tighthead side had been going backwards for fifty minutes.
The sheet records both scrums at 100 per cent, which tells you only that nobody lost their own put-in; the damage was in the penalty count, and Sale conceded a couple of scrum free kicks of their own along the way, which is the qualifier. Even so, Rodd and Asher Opoku-Fordjour were arguably the best two forwards on the pitch for the hour, and Rodd’s work in the 48-minute turnover, alongside Curry and Lawes on the eighth Bristol ruck, rounded off as complete a game as a loosehead can play. If the tight has caught up with the rest of him, England’s loosehead conversation just got harder, and Genge was stood on the same pitch to hear it.
England Watch
The centre of it was at 13. Joe Marchant and Benhard Janse van Rensburg are both capped England outside centres, and they’re opposites: van Rensburg is the ball player and the carrier, and his short line on Rees-Zammit’s second try held two defenders and narrowed the Sale line so the pass had room to travel, whilst Marchant is the aerial, chase and defence 13, and twice read the 13 fold and closed it, the second a big shot on Randall in the last quarter.
Marchant ran 56 metres, beat three defenders and won a turnover; van Rensburg carried into the wall all afternoon, and it was him apologising to Cox on the referee’s mic for a Bristol side that wasn’t listening. Two answers to the same question, and which one Steve Borthwick wants depends on whether he’s picking a 13 to make play or to stop it.
Lawes and Curry started together for the first time since the 2023 World Cup semi-final, and it took them half an hour to find each other. Bristol’s ruck pressure was aimed straight at that pair for much of the first half, and Harding’s steal off Lawes was a 37-year-old being schooled by a captain in his prime; but the last thirty minutes belonged to them, the turnover on 48, the goal-line stand that held Rubiolo up, and Curry picking up a bobbling ball, making his metres and throwing a chicken-wing offload to Roe for the try that made it 27-24.
Curry’s 15 passes were the most of any Sale forward. Joe Carpenter, with 82 metres, three clean breaks and twelve defenders beaten, was the best back on the field; Gabriel Oghre won two turnovers and is spoken of as the best scrummager among the young hookers, which makes Bristol’s scrum trouble a tighthead problem rather than a front-row one.
The six numbers again
Yesterday we argued that Test rugby is decided largely by six measures: most kick metres, fewest rucks, fewest turnovers conceded, fewest penalties conceded, most carry metres and most 22 entries. Run Saturday through them. Bristol kicked 584 metres to 376, built 83 rucks to 88, conceded two turnovers to eight, and gave away fewer penalties than a Sale side that had reached eleven a minute into the second half. Sale won carry metres, by a distance, and the possession column that gets read out on television; the entries aren’t on the sheet, but five tries from 190 metres says Bristol’s were the productive ones.
That’s four of the five countable columns to the away side, and the result followed, at club level in round one, exactly as it did in Baltimore. Sale won the numbers everybody talks about and lost the ones that decide it, and the ruck count is the tell: a side that set out not to ruck still built more of them than the side happy to grind, because every error and every turnover sent them back to start again. Bristol played narrow, went to the wall, held less width than their reputation and won by ten. Round two takes Sale to Saracens at the StoneX next Sunday.