Mallett eager to restore the sagging spirit of Bath

As retirement looms, the Recreation Ground's veteran prop is desperate to keep his club in the top flight

The best night at the Recreation Ground this season? No contest. It was not the spontaneous consequence of some famous victory in the Premiership or the Powergen Cup – apart from anything else, there haven't been any famous victories – and it had nothing to do with Bath's semi-successful run in Europe's second-tier competition. The beer and laughter has flowed on only one occasion – a testimonial match for John Mallett late last month, featuring a couple of dozen old lags from the club's glory days, a good-time Friday night crowd and a googol of pint glasses.

"Someone has been peddling a story about us drinking until 7am," Mallett said this week. "Scandalous. It was later than that. Apparently, the bar takings were three times the amount we get after a sell-out Premiership game. We absolutely ripped into each other, going back over all the old scandals and yarns and tall tales. In the end, there were just the two of us: Kevin Yates, my old front-row mucker, and myself. We toddled up the road to a hotel for breakfast – it must have been about eightish – and when the waiter offered us a choice of tea, coffee or fruit juice, Yatesey said: 'Two pints of Stella, my good man.' And to think it used to be like that after every match."

It should be perfectly legitimate for Mallett, a veritable mountain of a man from the flatlands of Lincolnshire, to amble dewy-eyed along the highways and byways of beloved memory. He is three games away from retirement (that three will become four if Bath reach the final of the Parker Pen Challenge Cup by beating Saracens by more than eight points this afternoon) and a new life as director of rugby at Brighton College. He has much to ponder: grand occasions, major-league frustrations, career-threatening injuries, the ebb and flow of sporting fortune. Above all, he can reflect on an autumnal surge of form bordering on the heroic.

But this is no time for reflection. Today, and every other day until the end of the regular season on 10 May, is about urgency and hunger and desire. Above all, it is about survival. If Bath fail this afternoon, it will not quite be the end of their world, although it will hurt like hell. If they fail to beat Bristol, their fellow relegation candidates, in the mother of all West Country derbies next weekend, the club might well follow their revered tight-head prop into the past tense. For Mallett, there is no going gentle into that good night.

Only two members of the present senior squad can claim first-hand experience of Bath in their pomp: one is Mike Catt, the other is Mallett. Of the two, Mallett is the longer-serving, having joined at the turn of the 1990s. "I was at college in London and had no connection at all with Bath," he recalled. "But it was the obvious destination in those days. If they said 'Come down, let's have a look at you', you were on the first train. Five or six of us joined at the same time – Steve Ojomoh, Adedayo Adebayo, a few others – having played England age-group stuff together. Bath had that pull back then. It was the only club in town."

Mallett looked the cat's whiskers then, a new-age front-rower with a dynamic streak, a bull of a player armed with the physique of a natural scrummager. But it was never easy for him. Richard Lee, the unfathomably strong farmer from Wellington, was the senior tight head at the time, and Gareth Chilcott also enjoyed a dabble on the right-hand side of the scrum. Victor Ubogu pitched up in the early 90s, too – a very different brand of prop, posing a very different challenge. The competition was so intense that Mallett was selected for England's tour of South Africa in 1994, and for the World Cup squad a year later, without ever becoming an automatic pick at club level. Jack Rowell's "good enough for England but not good enough for Bath" mantra was not far wide of the mark.

"A challenging environment? You could say," acknowledged Mallett. "When I first arrived at Bath, Jack Rowell used to say to 'Oafy' Lee: 'I need to see Mallett at tight head today.' But Richard would invariably get to the dressing room before me, pull on the No 3 shirt and look me straight in the eyeballs, as if to say: 'If you want this shirt, boy, you know what you'll have to do?' Chilcott? Well, you didn't argue with him, did you? As for Victor, I used to relish training against him. I'd make it nice and rough, ask him a few questions he didn't want to answer. Unfortunately for me, he only trained about once a month, damn him."

Then came the recurring back problems, the all-too-familiar bulging disc condition that is the bane of a prop forward's life. Mallett had two bouts of it, and two rounds of surgery. "The second time, three years ago, I thought: 'That's my lot.' And then, I thought again. I decided that I hadn't fulfilled myself as a Bath player, that I hadn't made the contribution I'd set out to make when I came down from London. So I worked on my fitness, got myself up to speed and gave it another go. Enthusiasm wasn't a problem – I'd always had that, and I've always loved the club and what it stands for – and as the months went by, I felt increasingly good about my rugby."

And Bath have felt increasingly good about Mallett, for without him, they would have been a long way down the River Avon without a paddle. Their front-row act is unrecognisable from the ruthless, bullying units that carried them to umpteen league and cup titles between 1984 and 1995. David Barnes, the current first-choice loose head, is a trier but no world-beater, while Alessio Galasso, the imported Frenchman, merely tries the patience of the coaching staff. Mallett takes the odd pummeling, as would any 31-year-old with two back operations behind him, but he holds the thing together as best he can.

Bath's plight grieves him. "I want to finish on a high, for obvious reasons, but the real business of the next three weeks is to ensure that Bath remain where they need to be, in the Premiership," he said. "We inhabit a completely different world now. It was inevitable that times would change with the move to professionalism, not least because other clubs were always going to up their acts and target us. But maybe we didn't handle the transition as well as we might have done. We ended up asking a lot of young players to grow up very quickly, and that left us vulnerable.

"When I arrived here, there were leaders wherever you looked: Graham Dawe, for instance, would tell me where to stick my head, and I'd do it unquestioningly. If I'm being honest, I'd say we've lost that sense of leadership in recent seasons; that there has been a lack of direction from the more experienced people in the squad. I count myself among those people who have failed the club in that regard. I always considered myself one of the troops, but looking back, I should have taken more responsibility, and taken it earlier."

Is it recoverable, the old spirit? At this, of all moments? "Yes, I'm convinced of it. I still sense an air of ambition about the place. The important thing now is to make sure the younger blokes understand what they're playing for over the next few games, appreciate the history stitched into the shirts they wear. I'm not saying we should swamp them with that history, but they need to know what's what.

"I have so many wonderful memories – of winning great battles down in the south of France, of coming on for my one England cap against Western Samoa in the World Cup and finding myself part of an all-Bath front row. The one thing I do not intend to do is leave The Rec with the club on its knees. This last challenge is the biggest one any of us have faced. It will be quite a way to finish."