Michael Claassens: 'If fans booed I didn't hear it'

After just one win all season, Bath are second from bottom in the league. Club captain Michael Claassens tells Chris Hewett why he's sure the long-established titans of English rugby can turn their season around

(DAVID ASHDOWN)

The faces, dozens of them, peer down from the walls of the Recreation Ground's public bar: Stuart Barnes and Richard Hill, Jeremy Guscott and Tony Swift, John Hall and Andy Robinson, Gareth Chilcott and Graham Dawe – part seraphic host, part rogues' gallery.

Some of these people considered it the end of the world if they tasted defeat more than once a season; Barnes, perhaps the most influential club player of the modern era, lost barely a dozen serious matches over the course of an extraordinary nine-year career at Bath. There is no escaping the history here. Not for a single second.

During the good times, the pressure of the past weighs lightly on the shoulders of those charged with maintaining standards, of keeping up with the Barneses. Unfortunately for the South African scrum-half Michael Claassens, these particular times are anything but good. Four months into his first spell as captain, he has already seen his side lose on nine occasions across three competitions, and if the West Countrymen go under again at Northampton this afternoon, as they are widely expected to do, they will break up for Christmas with only a single Premiership victory to their name.

One of Bath's midfield maestros of yesteryear, John Palmer, sees the problem as psychological, rather than technical or tactical. "It's become a mental thing," says the old centre, standing under his own framed portrait during a break from coaching the second-string and academy players. "There were games early in the season that could easily have been won. When you keep letting games slip that might have gone your way, it starts getting to you. It'll turn round."

Claassens agrees with this diagnosis, wholeheartedly. "John's right," he asserts. "I can't sit here and say it isn't frustrating, losing the games we're losing, but there's no reason for us to stop believing. There were four or five matches early in the season where we put ourselves in a position to win, but failed to complete the job. There was no one thing linking those failures: sometimes it was poor discipline, sometimes there were a couple of 50-50 calls from the referee that went against us, sometimes it was a simple case of errors at the wrong moments. But we were right in those matches, even though we weren't performing at our best, and I'm as confident in our capacity to get results now as I was back in September. There are too many good players here to stay where we are for long."

Local folk are hoping he is right, for Bath are in a perilous position. Two perilous positions, in fact: 11th out of 12 in the Guinness Premiership and bottom of the Pool Four pile in the Heineken Cup (played two, lost two). The last time things were this bad, in 2003, only a French-style "try from the end of the earth" from Elvis Seveali'i, spared them the trauma of relegation. If no one seriously expects them to be in a similar predicament come May, the current situation remains disconcerting. Ask the followers of Harlequins and Northampton. Those who thought those clubs were too good to go down ultimately found themselves thinking again.

All this is hard on Claassens, who has gone out of his way to make Premiership rugby worth watching over the last couple of seasons. In any popular poll the aforementioned Hill would be voted the finest Bath scrum-half in living memory, but Claassens might well challenge Andy Nicol, the Heineken Cup-winning captain of 1998, for second spot on the strength of his debut-season performance alone. He was no slouch last term, either, combining so effectively with his countryman Butch James that it was difficult to imagine how the Springbok selectors back home could bear to be without them.

James suffered a serious knee injury last April and Bath are feeling his absence more keenly by the week, but the recent arrival of a third South African international, the Western Province-bred loose forward Luke Watson, will ease the burden on the man from Kroonstad. While Claassens' previous captaincy experience was entirely of the schoolboy variety, Watson's natural authority is hard-wired.

"Luke will be good for us: he's already made his presence felt," Claassens says of the newcomer, whose reputation as one of South Africa's more controversial sporting sons stems from his family's public stand against apartheid during the desperate days of the 1970s and his own regular brushes with Springbok officialdom. "He's been through the fires a bit, for sure, yet he's come out stronger. Yes, he's arrived here at a difficult moment for the club, but he knows how to cope with difficulty. He's a good speaker, a good motivator, and he'll make a positive impact. The more strong leaders I have around me, the better."

Watson has pretty much given up on his Springbok career, which, if truth be told, gave up on him for good when, in a now notorious speech at a rugby festival in Cape Town at the back end of last year, he described wearing the green jersey as a "burden", adding that he had to struggle to keep himself from vomiting on it. Claassens, a quieter soul in every way, has not given up on anything. "Never say never," he replies when asked of his international ambitions. "I wasn't really in the mix when I left and I'm not in the coaches' thinking at the moment, but in the future, who knows?"

He has eight caps to his name, won, mostly off the bench, between 2004 and 2007, when his form for Free State propelled him up the pecking order. Unfortunately from his perspective, he was born within seven months of Fourie du Preez, who, by most reckonings, is far and away the most accomplished practitioner of the scrum-half's skills in international rugby.

"Fourie? I've played against him many times and he's the best scrum-half I've ever seen," Claassens says, candidly. "There are lots of aspects to a half-back's game, and most of us are better at some than others. Fourie has the lot. He can do it all. Look at the success of the teams he represents: the Blue Bulls are the major power in Currie Cup rugby, the Bulls franchise has done well at Super 14 level and the Boks are the reigning world champions, a team who beat the Lions and won the Tri-Nations this year. It's no accident that these teams have Fourie in their side. If he plays 10 games, he'll be absolutely solid in nine of them and be the man of the match in five."

Aware that the Springbok selectors will not consider picking him while he is playing his rugby outside the homeland, Claassens will have to make a career choice at some point over the next 18 months. "I'm contracted to Bath until the end of next season," he says, "and every time I look around me, I think to myself: 'Hell, it's going to be hard to leave this place'. It's why I haven't ruled out staying here long term. I was used to playing in front of 40,000 people in South Africa. The Rec holds a quarter of that. But I can honestly tell you that I've never encountered a rugby environment like this one. I know Butch feels the same, and I think Luke will discover it too.

"Last week against London Irish, we played some pretty poor rugby. Yet the supporters were there, in the pissing rain, getting behind us as they always do. People say there was booing from the crowd, but I didn't hear it. All I heard was encouragement. They deserve better than we're giving them at the moment, so that's a major motivation for us."

This afternoon's contest at Franklin's Gardens should be motivation enough. Northampton are flying, their ambitious England players – Ben Foden and Shane Geraghty, Dylan Hartley and Courtney Lawes – full of bristling intent. "It is," declares Claassens, "exactly the kind of game that could transform our season. If we take something away from there, it will give us something to build on."

Back in the glory days, rivals said the same kind of thing before travelling to the Rec – not that it did them an ounce of good. But Bath, current kings of the false start, need to begin somewhere. It is time for a dash of hard-edged Springbok ruthlessness.

National service British Boks

Premiership-based Springboks with best chance to claim a starting spot in next year's World Cup.

Wikus Van Heerden

(Saracens)

One of the most effective flankers in the English game, the 30-year-old forward is known to be in the thinking of Peter de Villiers, the Springbok coach. Rumours suggest that he is considering returning to Pretoria for another stint with the Blue Bulls, whom he left last year.

Schalk Brits

(Saracens)

The 28-year-old hooker tasted Test rugby last year before leaving Cape Town for England. South Africa may not be short of international class in his position, but with the long-serving John Smit on the downward slope, Brits' footballing brilliance could attract the Bokke coaches.

Brian Mujati

(Northampton)

Another front-row forward to win his caps in 2008, the 25-year-old prop has time on his side and is likely to reappear on the Springbok radar as a result of Northampton's excellent form. Again, the slow demise of Smit, who plays prop as well as hooker, could be beneficial.