Bath Cup captain Will Butt pitches in with cheeky Leicester dig

Lifting the PREM Rugby Cup aloft at Sandy Park having beaten the club he’s joining next season would be the dream scenario to end Will Butt’s 12 years at Bath.

However, the 26-year-old is far too grounded to run with ideas as fanciful as that; first Bath need to go to the Tigers’ lair and beat Leicester, while Exeter, his new club come the summer, have Northampton standing before them in the first of Sunday’s Cup semi-finals.

“I think that’s a scenario that we won’t think about yet,” said Butt, Bath’s stand-in Cup captain while Ewan Richards remains injured.

“We’ve got a game this week against Leicester to get through first so that’s where our focus has been at.

“They’re always tough to play against, tough to beat; we’ll be looking forward to the challenge.”

Butt added: “Welford Road is one of those grounds when you think of big English rugby venues.

“Hopefully, their pitch is in good nick because we’ve watched some footage from a couple of weeks ago and it was a little bit muddy. Hopefully, it has dried out a little bit.”

The irony of the pitch remark won’t be lost on Tigers fans who remember the bog-like status of The Rec before Johann van Graan shrewdly asked for artificial fibres to be woven into the sodden turf, which has improved the playing surface by the banks of the River Avon immeasurably.

It all adds to the rivalry, as does the potential presence of Orlando Bailey, another player brought up in blue, black and white, opposite him in the Leicester midfield.

“If I’m in that situaiton where we play against each other, I’ll enjoy it,” Butt remarked.

“I’ve got a good relationship with Landy. It’s really nice to see him going well at Leicester at the moment.

“He’s managed to find a a good slot for himself at centre.

“He’s a guy that’s played brilliantly for Bath for a long period of time. So it’s great to see him back on the pitch a bit more and taking his chances over there.”

Like Bailey, much of the motivation for Butt leaving the comfort zone of Bath was to try something new and, hopefully, get more game time.

In seven years in the senior Bath squad, the academy graduate has only made 26 Premiership starts.

Maybe knowing that his time at Bath is coming to end has given Butt a new lease of life, as he is playing as well now as ever. That and a consistent run of games in the Cup and maybe the captaincy, too, appear to have lifted his game.

“I’ve certainly enjoyed it,” he said about the captaincy. “It’s a special thing for me to get to lead the team.

“The nice thing is that we’ve got some other brilliant leaders in the group as well that make it really easy.

“We’ve got the likes of Ewan Richards who’s captained in the PREM Cup countless times and done a brilliant job of it; we’ve had Tom De Glanville playing in recent weeks; I’ve got Chris Harris outside me and you don’t get much more experience than him. So having those guys around as well makes it a bit easier.”

The surging runs have become more plentiful and prominent, his hands more secure and the right passes are being picked more often than not.

While it must also have helped that the longstanding rumours of him moving to the Chiefs have now been confirmed.

Butt has signed a three-year deal with the Devon outfit, as a replacement for Newcastle-bound Will Rigg, and they could yet see the very best of him, as was the case with previous Bath players who’ve trodden the same path – Ollie Devoto and Olly Woodburn.

The archetypal battering ram centre is moving there in his prime years. Did that make it an even harder decision?

“I suppose so. I sit in these kind of interviews for the PREM Cup and I get told I’m a young player who’s getting an opportunity to show what he can do.

“And it came to the eighth year that I was kind of having that conversation and I suddenly realised that I am not that young anyone, so that played into it a little bit, definitely.”