Dunn: I want to win stuff with Bath

WHILE the 2023/24 Premiership season is only in its early stages, for Bath stalwarts like Tom Dunn, the club’s upsurge in form is a very welcome change from the dark days when Bath couldn’t buy a win. 

- JON NEWCOMBE

No one cut a more disconsolate or frustrated figure than the Chippenham native, who was born with blue, black and white running through his pumpedup veins, when the six-time league champions suffered a 64-0 thrashing at the hands of gleeful Gloucester.

That nadir was only 18 months ago but now Bath, under the focused Johann van Graan are a completely different proposition.

And Dunn says he uses painful memories, like the Kingsholm debacle, as a form of “toxic motivation.”

“The core of the team has changed a lot since two/three years ago. But there is still that toxic motivation within a few of us where I don’t want to be remembered as that guy from that period of time. I want to be remembered as someone who won stuff with Bath Rugby and that’s what is driving me and it always has,” he said.

“So, collectively, I think that’s where this group is now, we have learnt from those times, we have seen the good things, the bad things we did, and when you go through those times together, you become tighter, you have to.

“What’s inside the room always becomes the most important thing and I felt like we’ve kept that mindset and that attitude and we are taking each week as it comes. You can have as much noise as you like with people saying, ‘you’re going to win this weekend’, but it is all about the boys in the room, in that circle, on the pitch.”

Bath’s off-season recruitment – bringing in the likes of Finn Russell and Thomas du Toit,