The shockingly bad stat that helps explain Bath's Champions Cup exit

Bordeaux’s star-studded team can make even the best defences look slipshod, yet it must be a concern for Bath how easily they were opened up in Sunday’s 38-26 Champions Cup sem-final defeat to the reigning champions.

The Top 14 outfit outmanoeuvred Bath in the wide channels and also punched plenty of holes through the middle of a porous defence that dropped off far too many tackles and has now conceded an average of 33.75 points in the last four games.

When you look at Bath’s tackle success rate in the post-match analysis, it’s a wonder that they even got as close as they did to Bordeaux on the scoreboard.

Bath’s tackle success of 56% was the lowest by any side in the 62 matches played to date in the competition, and one of only three to fall under 60%.

For context, the previous worst was also against Bordeaux (Leicester 57% in the Round of 16), while Sale managed to complete 59% of their tackles in the 77-7 hiding handed out to them by Toulouse.

But it wasn’t as though Bath had to go through a mountain of work in defence in terms of collisions, because their tackle count of 80 was less than half of Bordeaux’s tally of 198.

With tackling machine such as Tom Dunn, Guy Pepper and Sam Underhill available to them, Bath shouldn’t be setting such a low bar in this key match metric, while Finn Russell, who never shirks his defensive duties, was particularly culpable with eight of his 20 tackle attempts missed.

So, while there were plenty of other factors outside of their control contributing to Bath’s defeat, defence coach JP Ferreira will recognise this is an area that they need to put right if they are to successfully defend their Premiership crown.

At the moment, they may be staying true to Johann van Graan’s mantra of being hard to beat on the scoreboard, but they are proving too easy to beat man on man.