Pat Lam reacts as Bristol Bears beat their 'bogey team' to go top

Bristol director of rugby Pat Lam gave his players the target of being top of the league at the end of the evening and they delivered with a narrow 19-17 win over Sale in a titanic battle at Ashton Gate.

Bristol were never ahead until the 73rd minute with a yellow card in the 70th minute for Sale centre Rekeiti Ma’asi White proving decisive.

Kalaveti Ravouvou, Joe Owen and Matias Moroni were on Bristol’s try-scoring sheet with Tom Jordan and James Williams each kicking a conversion.

Tom O’Flaherty and Ernest van Rhyn crossed for Sale with George Ford converting both and adding a penalty.

Lam said: “We set out that was effectively to be a final and that we needed to win it to be top of the table as Sale are our bogey team and always seem to be up for this fixture.

Fixture

Gallagher Premiership

Bristol

19 - 17

Full-time

Sale

All Stats and Data

“We knew Sale would be very physical and we had to stay in the fight especially when we lost Aidan Boshoff in the warm-up and then Lovejoy (Chawatama) and Zam (Louis Rees-Zammit) in the first half.

“We continue to be decimated by injuries and have had to endure that all season so we had to fight for every moment today.

“I thought we were hard done by in the first half as a few decisions went against us but we could see they were beginning to tire and were able to carve them up for the winner.

“With this win, we’ve put ourselves in a good place in the league.”

Sale director of rugby Alex Sanderson believed his side had missed opportunities to win.

Sanderson said: “It’s a tough one to take as we turned up with the right mentality and we were executing our game plan well.

“However we let them out of their half too easily as that resulted in swings of 60-70 metres and although we defended well, they were repeatedly knocking at our door and eventually it had to give way.

“Losing players to injury and enforced rest periods for some others upset our cohesion and that proved costly in the last 10 minutes, especially after the yellow card.

“A missed drop goal, a couple of key moments, they are fine margins as we keep losing by one score or less, it’s probably four times recently that this has happened.

“The result is a crying same as it’s put a lot of pressure on us in the league as now every game is almost a must win.”