WHEN THE STUDENTS BECAME MASTERS

RELEASED by Charlton Athletic at 18, Kevin Watson never dreamed he’d wind up inside a giant bath being groped by Jonathan Ross.

- CHRIS DUNLAVY

Yet there he was, decked in the blue and gold of Team Bath, watched by an audience of millions on the BBC quiz show They Think It’s All Over.

“Looking back, it’s just surreal,” laughs Watson, now in charge at Step 4 Cray Valley PM. “It all came about because we reached the first round of the FA Cup in 2002. We were the first university team to do it in 122 years.

“A few months later they had us on the programme for a round called ‘Feel the Sportsman’. It was basically Jonathan Ross and Steve Davis trying to guess who we were.

“We had a great time. We were all taken to this hotel in Shepherd’s Bush, treated like superstars. We went to the green room. For a bunch of hard-up students it was pure luxury!”

Like They Think It’s All Over, Team Bath’s brief, glorious ride from the campus to the cusp of the Football League is now consigned to history. Yet for nine years, the Scholars looked unstoppable.

Formed in 2000, Team Bath was the brainchild of Ged Roddy. Known today as the architect of the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan, Roddy was appointed as director of sport at Bath University in 1992 and quickly transformed the site’s modest ‘training village’ into a national hub for elite athletes.

Hurdler Colin Jackson and swimmer Mark Foster both used the university as a base, while students or alumni have featured at every Olympics since Atlanta ’96.

Football, though, was Roddy’s real passion. And his idea, based on the American scholarship model, was to fuse a university education with full-time training to give discarded academy players a second chance.