Harlequins' remarkable start to the season continued when Mike Brown secured their 10th straight win to match the record for the best start set 15 seasons ago – by Harlequins. The full-back scampered over five minutes from time to settle one of those matches that will only be remembered by those with a fascination for record books.
Fittingly the game ended with a mass of bodies piled up on the Harlequins line as Bath looked for the bonus point that would have given them something from the afternoon.
Nonetheless, Harlequins head for Europe and the Heineken Cup with their eighth win in the league to go with a couple in the Anglo Welsh Cup, although the lasting argument from The Rec will probably be about referees and their understanding of the dark arts of scrummaging. Not something to be expected when the most free-scoring side meets the side with the meanest of defences.
The first half set the scene perfectly, being one of those oddities where possession and territory had very little say in the point scoring.
Bath were out of the blocks in a flash and should have gone ahead twice from very kickable Sam Vesty penalties in the first three minutes before Dave Attwood finally made their early pressure pay with a trundled try in the 12th minute.
First Tom Biggs scuttled down the left and got to within a yard before George Lowe and George Robson held the wing up. Then twice more, through Michael Claassens and Ben Skirving, Bath seemed to be there before the scrum-half finally slipped the pass that put Attwood into a bit of space and over the line.
The sunny, autumnal day and a sell-out crowd might have been ordained for open rugby but Harlequins' response also came through the forwards, Chris Robshaw taking a 16th-minute lineout and getting three other big men to drive him, like a battering ram, through a flimsy defence.
With Nick Evans landing the conversion and a couple of penalties, the league leaders were 13-7 to the good from just a couple of visits to Bath territory. That they were hardly out of it for the next 24 made absolutely no difference to the score at half-time.
Evans and Vesty swapped penalties at the start of he second half before Evans pushed the gap out to nine points with his fourth when the referee Dean Richards finally lost patience with the front-row antics of Nathan Catt and Joe Marler, but the New Zealander pulled the next – and possibly one of the easiest – to end a run of 11 kicks without a miss.
He missed a second eight minutes from time – after Vesty had landed his second penalty of the afternoon – but Brown was about to settle the game, somehow escaping from the ruck he had helped set up to canter over under the Bath posts.
