It's time for Bath Rugby to meet The Parents

I never thought I'd write a rugby column that invoked a Lee Mears quote and a line from the cheesy – but hugely entertaining – American comedy Meet The Parents in the same breath.

But here goes.

It may have sounded like a piece of management-speak when it first came out of his lips, but when Mears said yesterday that the disciplinary hearings being handed out to a number of Bath players were beyond his "circle of control", he actually had a good point.

The outcome of those hearings will be made public next week. And until then, it's pointless to fret and stress about what the conclusion will be, especially when you're in the southern hemisphere and trying to concentrate on representing the British Lions.

But it's not the circle of control that the Bath camp should be most worried about. It's another circle – the circle of trust – that carries the most significance.

As Jack Burns, the notoriously hard to please father-in-law-to-be makes clear in Meet The Parents, you're only inside the circle of trust once you've proven your commitment to a family. And once you fall out of that circle of trust, you're out for good.

The problem that Bath could well he faced with, even after the outcomes of the disciplinary hearings are made public, is that not all the players will be sure whether they belong inside or outside the club's family or not, let alone the circle of trust.

When a trauma of this magnitude hits a club – with a number of players facing allegations about their behaviour – the ripples of crisis can continue to lap at the squad's collective psyche for months afterwards.

Professional rugby players and coaches – indeed, professionals in any sport – often talk about how it's the psychological edge that can tip the balance in their favour in a particular contest. The challenge for Bath now is to devise a way of handling the fall-out from the hearings in a way that doesn't batter their morale, which is bound to be pretty low now anyway.

For that reason, the action that the management takes – when it does finally take it – needs to be decisive.

If there are any 'rotten elements', as honorary club president Jack Rowell puts it, then they all – to a man – need to be weeded out and chucked out for good.

There can, surely, be no room for 'another chance', not after what happened with Matt Stevens in January.

And once that decisive action has been taken, a line needs to be drawn in the sand so that the Bath squad can get on with the healing process as swiftly as possible.

Without a line in the sand there can be no possibility of restoring trust at the club. And trust – between player and player, and player and management – is what's desperately going to be needed after such a protracted, deep- probing inquiry.

Appointing a captain is always a crucial decision for a head coach, but the decision takes on supreme importance for Steve Meehan when you have had such a monumental quake reduce your close season to rubble.

Meehan has indicated that he will once again seek to appoint joint captains for the 2009-10 season. The men he needs filling these roles must, more than ever, be unifiers able to lead a group out of a crisis. Meehan will face many tough decisions over the next few weeks, but get this call wrong and the club's trauma may be long-lasting.

For more of my columns that have appeared in The Bath Chronicle, click here