Back to the future

Ugly pack and backs you would pay to watch: Bath revive memories of 1990s

- Andy Bull

The first thing anyone who cares says when they find out you're a sports journalist is to ask whether or not you were at whichever big game was on that weekend. The second, after you've explained, apologetically, that you don't actually follow football, is usually an awkward pause. There are all sorts of reasons why you may prefer any other sort of sport, but after 20 years of variations on this conversation, I've learned that unless you want to come across like someone who insists they prefer art-house cinema and free jazz, it's best to have a straightforward explanation. Mine is that I grew up in Bath.

They do play football in Bath, out at Twerton Park. The club have never been in the Football League (right now they're in National League South), and most weeks they draw a crowd of around a thousand. Which isn't so very many more than you'll find crowded around the stone balustrades of the city's parade gardens, trying to peer across the weir and see into the Rec when the rugby club have a home game. Bath's football has always been bad. But in the 80s and 90s Bath's rugby was so good that the brand still stands for something, even after they have been mediocre for a large part of the past 30 years.