By Monkey1
January 4 2014

 Only two things matter in a game of professional rugby; coming away with points and keeping the support base happy. The dismal 8 - 16 loss at Kingston Park to Sale last night achieved neither, indeed many supporters felt so disgusted that they booed the Falcons off the pitch.  

The mutiny in the South Stand towards the end of the game was a tangible force. You didn’t have to hear what the supporters around you were saying, you could feel it, like a powder keg just waiting for a spark. This was all the more frustrating as the game started off so well, we actually played some bloody good rugby in the first half.

The Falcons looked lively from the kick off, with new Samoan signing Sinoti Sinoti offering lots of pace on the wing. Both teams shifted the ball about with enthusiasm before the weather closed in, Phil Godman earning us an early penalty, but this was soon equalised by a return effort from his opposite number Danny Cipriani.

Our games against Sale are often entertaining affairs, and as the first quarter ended the home crowd were more than pleased to see our lot looking like they were in it to win it for a change. A pathetically soft try however ended this euphoria and a feeling of déjà vu descended as Tom Brady found an easy hole in our defence to plonk the ball down in the right hand corner. Cipriani converted from the touchline in a manner that eludes our place kickers at present.

That pretty much ended any inventive backs play by the Falcons for the night. A couple of penalties in our favour saw play moved up in front of the South Stand, and as the forwards ground the ball slowly towards the line the supporters were baying for it to be sent wide where Sinoti was poorly covered, but it was never going to happen.

The forwards kept it to themselves and were rewarded with a penalty. Godman kicked to the corner and from the line out we collected for a well executed try, only to find the mysterious ways of Mr Small had blown for a penalty in our favour literally as they crossed the line. Godman went for the corner again and a medium throw into the line was collected cleanly. Sale had no answer to the sheer grunt that saw the ball dotted over the line by Andy Saull, almost exactly where it had been just a couple of minutes previously. Godman failed to convert what should have been an easy kick.

As often happens, our defences came down in the aftermath of scoring. Sale had little difficulty in working the ball up the pitch and reckless defence saw Del Fava binned with 9 minutes to go, Cipriani taking another 3 points.

The Falcons were now fully returned to their bad old ways, and seemed to be running the clock down for the rest of the half, a dangerous policy that saw them penalised half way up the pitch & sent all the way back. Sale however fluffed the lineout and nothing more of interest happened as the rain put in a big performance to end the first half, the score 8 – 13.

To describe the second half in detail is to miss the point, what matters is the bigger picture, and it isn’t pretty. Despite the passing of over 250 years since Samuel Johnson first published his dictionary, words have still not been devised to fully describe the second half. Awful doesn’t even come close, wretched is a bit better, execrable is about as close as you will get. To those who occasionally watch rugby it will have looked bad enough, but for Falcons supporters of many years it encapsulated everything that has kept us depressingly at or near the bottom of the league for years, eventually leading to relegation.

Like somebody repeatedly landing blows upon a painful bruise we were forced to witness the pointless kicking away of attacking ball, aimless execution of basic passing, the ball hopelessly worked from side to side, losing us territory with every move. The only way to get the ball up field was to hoof it, and it was hoofed time after time straight into the waiting arms of Rob Miller. He rarely had to even move to collect the ball, and because none of our lot could be bothered to chase kicks he had no problem sending us further back with every ping pong exchange.

Sale earned another penalty to take the score beyond our reach and deny us even a losing bonus point. The restart symbolised everything that is wrong with Newcastle Falcons under the lax regime of Dean Richards. By now Clegg had replaced the woeful Godman. He punted a fine enough kick into Sale territory but nobody chased it. A few players jogged vaguely in that direction, most walked, much easier just to let Sale shove it all the way back. It is this cannot be bothered attitude that needs to be wiped out with a rod of iron, it has been killing our team for years. Dean Richards should have had every single player who took to the pitch last night assembled at KP at 8am this morning to go over that game and rip them apart. Instead I suppose they will have a comfortable weekend off. I honestly doubt that Richards has the balls to discipline the team like that, and unless he grows a pair pretty soon this team is going nowhere except down.

As I wonder how to finish this off, I keep coming back to the boos at the end of the game. I hope Dean Richards heard them, and I hope he didn’t make the mistake of thinking the boos were for Sale or the referee, they were aimed at his team, they were aimed at him. I don’t approve of booing, especially for my own team which I am supposed to support, but that act by a fair number of disgusted Falcons supporters tells the true tale of last night’s game. Richards may think he can take his time building a team for the future, but the supporters have already given many years of their time to this team and time has now run out. We expected to see progress by now, a season and a half has gone by under the Richards regime and what we saw last night was as bad as anything offered up in the days when Alan Tait was trying to hold the fragments of the dying club together on a shoestring with morale at rock bottom.

A new year has dawned, yet we seem to be stuck in the past. Something has to change, and if Richards cannot get our team to change, then we need to change our DoR. Carrying on as we are is simply not an option. We saw some positives despite the gloom last night. Sinoti looks superb, like the Kibirige we expect to see in the future. McLeod was outstanding even when the rest of the team turned to rubbish, and although I have not been a big fan of Brookes in the past he worked his nuts off last night. One positive not on show last night was Joel Hodgson. I have disagreed with previous calls for his inclusion on the team sheet as he has lacked game time, and putting him amongst the shambles would do him more harm than good. He has now however clocked up a few games with Rotherham & I get the feeling his time may have come.

The first quarter of the game showed glimpses of what our squad can achieve when they want to, so when Richards has finished roasting them he can then point at the first 20 minutes of last night’s game, get them to watch it, then make them do more of that and no more of the utter dross that followed.

Rant over.

For now anyway.