Bath have come a long way this season, finishing third in the pre-Play-Off League with fifteen wins compared to last year when we finished eighth with just eight wins. However the Bath performances of the last two weeks demonstrate that we still are some way from being the finished article and we are still inclined to be the weaker of two sides when mental, as opposed to physical toughness is required.

Wasps were getting hammered for territory and possession throughout the first half and then conceded the softest of tries when Josh Lewsey dropped Danny Cipriani's desperation pass inside the Wasps in-goal area. Alex Crockett fell grateful on the bouncing ball for the opening score of the match. 

But did the Wasps players let their heads drop? No of course not, they showed a steely determination you would expect from a team led by Lawrence Dallaglio and coached by Shaun Edwards. Within nine minutes they'd attacked the Bath line twice and scored two tries. This is play befitting a team going to Twickenham to contest the Premiership Final and Bath need to learn this skill if they are to return to the very top after too many years in the Premiership wilderness.

Bath got off to a blistering start, keeping Wasps on the back foot and it wasn't long before they secured a succession of very kickable penalties, especially for a man like Olly Barkley with a 83% kicking rate. However he missed the first and then the second, despite wrongly questioning the decision to deny him three points. 

Then surprisingly skipper Borthwick opted to kick the next two penalties to touch and both times Wasps wrapped up the Bath line-out ball so that there was no advantage to the visitors. I'm still amazed that Borthwick should so quickly abandon Barkley as a kicker when he knew this would always be a close encounter, possibly won by one or two conversions. Had Barkley met normal expectations and slotted home all four conversions this could have been a different game because as soon as Wasps took the lead Bath were always chasing the game against opponents who know how to manage such situations.

A tough encounter was soured by the terrible injury to Danny Cipriani , who appeared to dislocate his ankle early in the second half. As always in such cases, the whole rugby community comes together to wish the player well and the Bath medical staff supported the Wasps staff to make the lad as comfortable as they could. Bath hoped the absence of the young playmaker would give their game some impetus but in the following thirty minutes all they managed was a Barkley penalty against a converted Tom Palmer try.

Palmer's try followed an excellent run by Tom Voyce, who continues to punish the errors of his former team, but after being scragged, Voyce was lucky not to have been penalised for hanging on to the ball as he awaited support from his team mates. He wasn't and Palmers score just about put the game to bed despite Fraser Waters taking the punishment for a team penalty for regular offside infringements.

Of course comment could, and probably will, be made about the Wasps offside game ploy and the fact that the officials gave the home team an advantage by waiting until the 70th minute to pick up on their illegal play. However it's not as if this ploy will have been a surprise to anyone, we all now how they play and therefore should have a ploy of our own to overcome this aspect of the game. I  no problem with Wasps breaking the laws because that is their right until they get penalised.

The one area of the game Bath really dominated was in the scrum and their only advantage was removed as soon as Wasps ran out of "live" props to make the scrums uncontested. Personally I think that if a team can't field a fit prop for scrummaging purposes then the opposing side should be given a tap start to replace the scrum. I'm sure this would soon solve the issue of injuries because I don't remember these situations in the past.

Losing Lee Mears before the game to injury and Michael Lipman during the first half didn't help Bath's cause but, to be honest, they didn't look like scoring a try all afternoon and it took a bit of luck for Crockett to touch down.

The Bath backs struggled to make any impact. Michael Claassens probably had the toughest match of his Bath career as Wasps slowed down his game. This in turn affected Butch James who was generally anonymous whilst Olly Barkley was almost totally shut out. Crockett and Maddock looked exciting when they got the ball but the fluidity of running and passing was missing throughout the team. 

However, let's not start criticising a group of players who have made us purr over the last few months: we all know we have a way to go to get this team to reach its potential.

Let's hope the Bath boys can get this disappointment out of their system for next week's Cup Final against Worcester. After all, we don't want to end up like Bristol and Glawster and have no silverware this season do we?

Referee: Chris White

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