Mantras are a regular occurrence in sport.
‘Hungry dogs run faster’ was the mantra that fired the Philadelphia Eagles to the 2018 Super Bowl, Chicago Bulls head coach Phil Jackson – the man behind the great team of the 1990s – said “create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome” and the All Blacks had ‘no dickheads’.
For Bath, it’s “stick to process”.
That mantra is exclaimed by head of rugby Johann van Graan following every match, win or lose. And, it’s working too.
Since Van Graan has taken over at the Rec, Bath have steadily improved year-on-year. His first season at the helm saw them return to the Champions Cup one year after finishing rock bottom of the Premiership, his second saw them reach the showpiece domestic final, eventually losing to Northampton Saints, and this season they have gone one step further.
Bath finally ended their trophy drought with the Premiership Rugby Cup, and one quickly became two in the form of the EPCR Challenge Cup, and now they are just two wins away from a famous treble.
“Stick to process” was the mantra leading into the 37-12 win against Lyon two weeks ago, and it’s exactly what is firing them into battle again this weekend against West Country rivals Bristol Bears.
‘The bigger the occasion, the simpler you need to keep it’
“One of the things I learnt early at the Bulls, when we were on our journey from finishing bottom to winning three Super Rugby titles in four years, is that the bigger the occasion, the simpler you need to keep it,” says Van Graan. “In my time in Test rugby, too, and this sounds so obvious, I learned that you get tested.
“In a semi-final, you get tested by what you did in the previous weeks. The result at the end of the 80 minutes is once off, it’s not about scoring four tries or trying different things, this is about following your process to get into the final of the Premiership. That brings added pressure.
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“The way we do things at Bath, we believe in what we do, and on days like Friday evening, we keep it as simple as possible. What does that mean for us? Just stick to what we’ve done. We’ll stick to our process as we’ve done today, as we’ll do tomorrow and as we’ll do when we start the game on Friday evening.
“The most important bit is those 80 minutes, or around two hours including half-time, from a process point of view on Friday. We’re looking forward to doing battle.”
Top of the pile
Process can mean an awful lot, particularly in the brain of rugby sensei Van Graan and the experienced players such as Charlie Ewels, but it also makes things incredibly simple as well.
“What is it literally? It’s the training week, it’s the way we meet, do walkthroughs, prepare, your individual process and how you get yourself right for the game,” Ewels disclosed.
“Then, on the pitch, it’s when the game throws problems at us, do we do what we say we were going to do and what we’ve trained or do we go off and look for different answers.”
He adds: “We know how we want to defend, attack, strike from lineouts and how we want our scrum and our maul and all those things to look; so when the game throws problems at us, whether that’s pressure, external noise, refereeing decisions, conditions, crowd noise, whatever that might be, do we stick to what we’re trying to do and what we said we would do.”
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And it seems the players have stuck by that principle in 2024/25, if the regular season is anything to go by. Bath ended it top of the table with 14 wins from their 18 matches and also claimed a whopping 16 bonus points in that time.
Around this, they have also scored the most points of any team in the league on 651 (an average of 36.2 per game), while also boasting the best defence in the league too, with only 417 points conceded (an average of 23.2 per game).
Emotions
Bath’s process has already got them to some huge games in the past two seasons. Last year, they reached the Premiership play-offs for the first time since 2020 as they came up against Sale Sharks, and victory there took them to the showpiece final at Twickenham.
While they tasted defeat that day against Northampton Saints, as Alex Mitchell’s late score snatched the victory, they have come back even stronger.
This season alone has already seen them play in two finals in the form of the Premiership Rugby Cup and the Challenge Cup, and now they know what it takes to peak at the right moments.
“I think the personality of the coaching group and some of the key leaders is calm and process-driven,” Ewels adds. “The training week will look like any other training week, and we have an understanding we’ve got to put the foundations in place and get our game right.
“From an emotional point of view on Friday, I’m such a believer, and when I was younger I probably felt the need to do more and say more to overcompensate for myself, but it’s individual and the work you do to get yourself in the right place and the occasion will do 90% of that for us. It’s then about if we can fall back to the level of our training and how well we laid the foundations in training.
“The danger is that you can get dragged into talking about finals, and before you know it, you’re not there, because you didn’t get the semi right. All the focus this week has been on the semi.
“If you feel the group shifting to booking hotels in Twickenham or any nonsense like that, that’s the first thing to stamp out because you’re not in the right place; but there’s been none of that. All the talk has been on Bristol and on this week.
“We’re one year more mature. There are only four or five knock-out games in a year across the competitions you can actually play in, and we’ve played in the semi’s and finals of two of the competitions we’ve been in, so that’s more experience the group has had together of playing in big knockout games.
“You can try and replicate it, but there is something different about that match-day. The big thing I’ve taken from it is that it all comes down to basics and how well you can play your game on the day, and not the occasion. We’ve had four more of them than we did last year, so we’re four games better at that.”
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