Bath want to replay last week’s Champions Cup defeat to Toulouse and their owner, Bruce Craig, would doubtless love this result to be amended as well. On balance neither side deserved to lose a frenetic 10-try thriller but, for the second Saturday in a row, a late Bath penalty miss deprived them of a crucial win in Pool 1.
On this occasion it was Bath’s replacement fly-half, Alex Davies, who missed from a wide angle, with Freddie Burns having hobbled off injured six minutes earlier.
It proved the decisive moment of a topsy-turvy contest that left Wasps’ director of rugby, Dai Young, with mixed feelings. “I don’t know whether to be angry or relieved,” said Young, having watched his initially lacklustre team fight back from 21-7 down at half-time to secure three much-needed points.
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Very little at Wasps is predictable at the moment, with last week’s 52-3 drubbing by Leinster still fresh in the memory. Christian Wade’s decision to quit rugby to try his hand at American football has been another untimely distraction, with the club in no hurry to wave farewell to a key contracted player on the eve of the November internationals. Supporters are entitled to some answers but the club are still refusing to comment on what they insist is a legally sensitive matter. “Hopefully it will be cleared up soon rather than later,” said Young with a sigh.
Todd Blackadder, meanwhile, does not expect Craig’s fanciful appeal for a Toulouse rematch to be successful, preferring instead to praise Burns’s character in bouncing back from his agonising misjudgment in failing to ground the ball when clean through for the winning score a week ago. The fly-half slotted a perfect five conversions from the tee here but a damaged knee denied him the chance to deliver the match-winning postscript when Wasps’ Juan de Jongh was penalised for not rolling away on the floor with under two minutes remaining.
Instead it was left to Will Chudley, the former Exeter scrum-half belatedly making his competitive debut for his new club, and the winger Joe Cokanasiga, a member of England’s squad for next month’s autumn series, to leave the most lasting impression. Chudley injected much-needed tactical nous into Bath’s game and inside the first three minutes sent the powerful Cokanasiga surging to the line.
Further scores for Max Wright and an intercept effort for Semesa Rokoduguni left Wasps up against it even after Bath had been reduced to 14 men when François Louw was sent to the sin-bin for a tip tackle late in the first half. In a one-sided third quarter, however, the hosts scored three converted tries inside nine minutes through Joe Simpson, Zurabi Zhvania and a bullocking Ashley Johnson to take a 28-21 lead.
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Charlie Ewels responded with a galloping try of his own to draw Bath level again before a close-range 64th-minute score by Louw once more gave Bath the edge. Could they cling on?
With nine minutes left a thrilling series of attacking thrusts from Wasps ended with Rob Miller and Joe Simpson setting up Thomas Young for a breathless score, converted once again by Lima Sopoaga.
The range of crowd emotions that greeted poor Davis’s missed penalty, however, were rather less striking than the booing that started up each time Eddie Jones’s face appeared on the big screen in the first half. If there was a slight pantomime element – it did eventually morph into ironic cheering – it was hard to recall it happening before. On and off the field these are increasingly febrile times in English union.