LONG READ Maverick Bristol ringmaster won’t change Bears' fearless high-wire act despite injuries

For a rugby coach there are some spells when everything you touch falls satisfyingly into place but others where it feels like the game is amusing itself at your expense with a crushing pile-on.

Pat Lam is currently experiencing one of the latter periods.

Shipping 50 points at Saracens last weekend was no fun for Lam or his Bristol team but it is the collateral damage the Bears’ backline is suffering on a weekly basis which must be of more long-term concern.

After losing his first-choice half-backs, Harry Randall and AJ MacGinty, as well as his jack-in-the-box wing Gabriel Ibitoye to long-term injuries in week one of the Prem, Lam saw three more backs – Joe Jenkins, Louis Rees-Zammit and Tom Jordan – leave the field in week two.

He was already without Rich Lane, James Williams, Jack Bates, Noah Heward, Sam Wolstenholme, Benjamin Elizalde and Toby Baker.

“It’s not an ideal situation,” is Lam’s understated take.

Next cab off the rank is Lam’s breezy mantra but when the rank is deserted and your app is telling you there aren’t any drivers in your area, there isn’t much you can do.

The hunt is on to try to find some emergency stopgaps but most players worth their salt are firmly tied down at this time of the season.

We have our DNA that we want to play with and that’s being fearless. If it’s on, let’s go.

The question is how Bristol keep playing their unique brand of wide, attacking rugby when they haven’t any backs left because, one thing is for certain, Lam will not be changing his approach. It is hard-wired in.

“We have our DNA that we want to play with and that’s being fearless. If it’s on, let’s go,” said Lam.

“If you look at our values of what we are as a club and where we want to get to, 100 per cent we want to win, but it’s the way we go about it that’s as important.

“Everyone plays the game differently – that’s what’s great about our game – but for us, if we look at our demographics, we have more females coming to the game, more younger people coming to the game – it’s all changing – and that’s because of the way we play and the way we do things.”

The Bears’ average attendance was pushing 18,000 last season in the league and they broke the 20,000 barrier for their opening-day victory against Leicester. Lam believes that as well as attracting fans to Bristol, the razzle-dazzle attracts players to the club too.

“A lot of guys that come in talk about the Bears’ way. We have a distinct way of playing and guys want to be part of that. It suits certain players,” he said.

“If you look at someone like Louis Rees-Zammit, he had a few choices about where he might go and if it was a money thing he wouldn’t have come to us but with the way we play, he knew he was certain to be getting the ball a lot.”

While Rees-Zammit’s capture was the most eye-catching signing of the summer in English rugby, Lam would have wanted to integrate him more gradually on his return to rugby union from American football. Necessity though has meant he had to play a full 80 minutes against the Tigers and 66 against Saracens before he was hurt.

The Wales superstar’s toe issue is hopefully just short term. Lam hopes that Rees-Zammit and Jordan might be available to play against Exeter this weekend. There may be a degree of wishful thinking involved, given the body count.

This is the Aucklander’s ninth season with Bristol and he has been around the block enough times to know events conspire from time to time.

Plenty of water has flowed under Clifton Suspension Bridge since he arrived at the club with Bristol having just been relegated from the Premiership.

For one, the Premiership is no longer the Premiership.

It’s a young person’s game now, you know. We have young people doing our social media and they’re always trying to get me to do things. It’s all about content. It’s all about attracting people to the game.

As a 57-year-old, Lam is an unlikely fan of this season’s Prem rebrand.

“When you typed: ‘premiership’ into a phone, you had to actually put ‘rugby premiership’, because otherwise you got Premier League football. But now you just put in ‘Prem’ and you should go straight to rugby so I can understand it,” he said.

“It’s a young person’s game now, you know. We have young people doing our social media and they’re always trying to get me to do things. It’s all about content. It’s all about attracting people to the game.

“I understand the market. We had a lot of controversy when we turned into the Bears – a lot of traditionalists and older fans weren’t happy about it – but look at the progress Bristol Rugby has made since we became Bristol Bears. That has been very successful.

“We want to be maverick at the Bears, we want to be innovative, so we are supportive of those sorts of things.”

Maverick and innovative could be Bristol’s watchwords.

For a side which plays the way they do, the autumn is when they really need to make hay. Their game is a dry-weather model designed for scoring tries in the sun, not slogging through deep mid-winter.

With a full deck and enough points in the bank, their style should also be tailor-made for an early-summer run-in. But the danger is that the knock-on effects from the opening fortnight’s misfortune could leave the Bears too much ground to make up in a season when they should be looking to reach a first Prem final.

Going down to the eventual champions Bath in last season’s semi-final having led at half-time at The Rec was a sure sign to their director of rugby that they are on the right path.

“We were extremely gutted after that semi-final. We had a genuine chance there, but little things cost us,” he said.

“Bath are our fiercest rivals and, without a doubt, they’re definitely the favourites again.”

Bears-ball is a highwire act. So much so that occasionally it can look like it has come straight out of the circus. The nagging question remains over whether risky rugby is fit-for-purpose to win trophies.

Bristol beat their neighbours twice last season – once at Ashton Gate in the Prem Cup, once at the Principality Stadium in the league. Over the course of a season though, Bath’s more pragmatic rugby prevailed. They were manifestly the more consistent side.

Bears-ball is a highwire act. So much so that occasionally it can look like it has come straight out of the circus. The nagging question remains over whether risky rugby is fit-for-purpose to win trophies.

Lam is adamant that it can, having masterminded one of the most unlikely triumphs in rugby history – Connacht’s staggering 2016 Pro 12 title which was built on the same adventurous blueprint.

So however challenging the circumstances of the moment, however many backs Bristol lose, Lam remains soldered to his philosophy.

English rugby’s great entertainers will continue to set out to entertain – and see where it takes them.