More often than not, the award would go to a player from one of the top four teams in the league, and they would earn it through their consistency in producing anchor performances throughout the season.
So, for Lawrence to win the award playing for a Bath team that finished eighth in the Premiership table, is a credit to the young centre and the way he bounced back after the upheaval he faced when Worcester went into receivership earlier in the season.
When any of us have real setbacks in our lives – as the players at Worcester and Wasps did after finding suddenly that they had been made redundant – you have to deal with the adversity. Lawrence did that impressively, as did flanker Ted Hill, by integrating so successfully into the Bath set up.
It meant Lawrence not only coming into a new club and learning different tactics and methods of training, and building new relationships with the players and coaches at The Rec, but also being front and central to Bath’s improvement over the course of the season.
Timing helps when it comes to winning awards, and it seems that what clinched it was Bath winning their last four games in succession, including Lawrence scoring the last-minute breakaway try against Saracens last weekend that secured a place in the European Cup.
It meant that there was a good atmosphere at The Rec after the last match of the season, because the fans, at last, had something to celebrate with big European matches against teams of the calibre of Leinster, La Rochelle and Toulouse back on the fixture list.
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