Coming through

By Mark H
July 24 2005

Defending the championship was always going to be difficult for Falcons; in many ways, the second season for any promoted team is, due to the opposition being more familiar with your game.

The task, however, was made almost impossible from the outset.

As we now, Tim Stimpson and John Bentley had already departed.  They were to be joined through the exit door almost immediately though by Pat Lam, to everyone’s surprise going to Northampton for £100,000.  Now (and we’re back to which story you believe again), there have been many tales over the years as to why Lammy went south.  Rumours of the board telling Andrew to sell (unlikely), of a disagreement between Andrew and Lam (extremely unlikely considering Lam was to re-sign in 2001), and of Lam being the victim of the two foreigner rule (most plausible) all being bandied about.  Again, we’ll never know for certain.

What we did know, however, was that Falcons did still have two foreigners, in Inga Tuigamala and new South African signing Marius Hurter.  Marius stayed until December 2004, and was a very good piece of business.  Other signings included England Under-21 players Michael Wood (a winger from West Hartlepool) and Peter Massey (a full back from Moseley), and Ian Peel from Wharfedale.

1998/99, looking back now, was to be the season that set the tone for the rest of the decade – season four of ten.  If you want to label seasons, then we’ve had the promotion season, the Championship season, and now the Transitional season.  Some would say part one of seven.

Even though Bath had won the European Cup in May, they weren’t allowed to defend it, as the English clubs had agreed on a boycott of the tournament.  You could say that Falcons were the biggest losers in the boycott; no first season in the primary European competition, no chance to test themselves.  I would disagree.  This was a Falcons team which had peaked in winning the title, and those champions were breaking up – during the season Nick Popplewell and Paul Van-Zandvliet would be forced to retire, Alan Tait would head back to Scotland, Richard Metcalfe would end up at Northampton, and others, Rob Andrew included, would find that their bodies were starting to fail them.

Given too that the competition at that time also featured strong Welsh sides (something it’s lacked recently in any great depth, with only Llanelli being the standard bearers, and which is only now being changed by the Ospreys and the Dragons improving), the usual consistency of the French elite, an inspirational Ulster side, and the other English representatives (which would have been Saracens, Bath and Leicester), and there’s no guarantee that Falcons would have survived the pool stages.  Harsh, but true.

The club, in the early months of the season, was giving the impression of one in turmoil.  The second team had been scrapped, results were indifferent to say the least, and players were leaving.  Most of all though, there was the upheaval of a permanent move to Gateshead.  Kingston Park was considered too small, with two new stands being erected at Gateshead to make a 10,000 capacity.  The “permanent move” saw a win over Bath, defeat to London Irish (the first on home territory for Falcons in the Premiership), and then a win over Wasps, but with an average crowd of only just over 4,000, compared to a break even figure of 7,000, the club announced that the following home match against Saracens would be the last before returning to Kingston Park.

The player issue was another thing entirely.  Paul Van Zandvliet’s car was hit be a tank transporter, and the resulting injuries meant that he never played again, the cruellest of fates for one of the most unsung of the championship winning squad.  Marius Hurter’s arrival was delayed by Western Province’s Currie Cup campaign, and as soon as he arrived, Dean Ryan then got a serious neck injury that ended up keeping him out for the rest of the season.  Not that it mattered greatly, for in January 1999, Ryan was transferred to Bristol, and the captain from the previous season was now also gone.  With Tony Underwood joining the injury list long term, and Doddie Weir signing a new contract then breaking an ankle, it was grim, and the motivation seemed to be gone – particularly as Steve Black, so adept in that area, also departed for the Welsh national set up.

With only eight wins in the first fourteen matches, and a best run of two wins on the trot, the title was disappearing over the horizon.  Four defeats in the next seven games speeded that process up, and Falcons were for all the world looking like a club that had peaked.

And then the bolt from the blue.

At the start of February 1999, Newcastle United, parent company of the Sporting Club, decided to ditch the Sporting Club side of the business.  This had been rumoured for months, but there were immediate repercussions.  Falcons had until 1^st March – just over three weeks – to get new backing or risk being wound up.  This was a worrying time for rugby as a whole – Bedford had not paid players or staff for weeks, and nearly went under; West Hartlepool ended up going down and made most of their players redundant; and at Richmond, Ashley Levett, the man who jumped on the same gravy train as Sir John Hall at the advent of professionalism, pulled the plug, Richmond were sent into administration, and were swallowed up, along with London Scottish, by London Irish as the one season expansion to fourteen clubs saw it end with just twelve.

There was a lot of sniffing around.  West Hartlepool suggested a merger and a north-east “superclub”, which was never going to happen as it would have meant a whole new set up; Cardiff, one of the Welsh rebel clubs, were very interested in buying their way into the Premiership, but were foiled by the Shareholders Association (their 1995 contract clause prevented the club from moving out of Kingston Park without their permission); and there were even suggestions of a merger with Northern that came to nought.  Eventually, after one bid had come in and was rejected, on 11 March 1999 Dave Thompson was announced as the new owner of the club – and he’s still here now, wanting the glory days to return as much as we all do.

Just as the last match of the Hall reign had seen a win (33-29 over Bath in the Cheltenham and Gloucester Cup), the first of the Thompson era saw a triumph, with a 43-25 home win over Swansea.  Despite the uncertainty of the previous months, the squad had managed to make it to two cup semi-finals. And one of those was next up, in the C&G Cup at Bedford.  When the game ended 27-all, Falcons were eliminated on try countback, the worst way to lose a semi-final, despite scoring three tries through Michael Wood, Jim Naylor and Tom May (in just his third appearance for the club).  May made his Premiership debut the following Saturday at Northampton, but a 57-16 defeat just a week before the second semi-final of the season was a bitter body blow.

Inga Tuigamala had predicted at the start of the season that Falcons would win the Tetley Cup, just as he’d forecast the championship win a year earlier.  After the disappointment of successive quarter-final defeats, Falcons had laid that particular bogey by beating Bath (coming from 22-6 down), West Hartlepool (featuring a 60 metre Hugh Vyvyan try), and in the quarter-final, holders Saracens 15-0 at Kingston Park.  Given the previous three seasons and the history of the two clubs, it was perhaps inevitable that Richmond, with the professional side of the club slowly disintegrating, would stand in the way of a place at Twickenham.  Two Tuigamala tries in a 20-3 victory at the Madejski saw Falcons claiming that place.

Again, somewhat inevitably, Wasps won the other semi-final against Gloucester to make it a final with feeling.  Ironically, the next league game was at Loftus Road, and once again Falcons went down by a point, 34-33, after a try in the second minute of injury time which saw Rob Andrew helped off with a dislocated shoulder in trying to prevent the try, just as Alex King kicked the winning conversion.

Then came the news that for Falcons was one year too late.  The European boycott had been called off, with the top six clubs in the league going into the Heineken Cup.  With four of the last five games at home, there was a chance of getting the place missed a year before, but it would probably need at least four and probably five wins to get it.  Richmond (47-14) and Gloucester (39-15) were beaten, but Leicester were next up, and Tim Stimpson gained a form of revenge on his old club by kicking seven penalties out of seven in a 21-12 away win for Tigers.

There then followed a week of the sort of madness that rugby brings up every so often.  After 34 games, Falcons would have to finish with three games in eight days.  With a cup final four days away, Andrew would have loved to play a reserve side in the last home game against Harlequins, but the Heineken carrot – at this point in time there was no qualification for the domestic cup winners – was still there.  A 33-23 win kept the dream alive, but it still meant that a win in the last game over Saracens was needed.

Before that, the cup final.  Leipy's review pretty much sums it up – Andrew’s injury prevented him from playing for the rest of the season, Wasps had learnt lessons from their final defeat a year earlier, and took control early on.  Falcons were always chasing the game, but the 29-19 result was fair, if painful.  The pain was made even worse by the Bath result that day.  Bath were fully expected to beat London Scottish, but the first minute sending off of lock Mick Watson for headbutting Martin Haag left Bath to run riot and win 76-13.  It meant that Falcons now not only needed to win at Saracens to get into the Heineken, but win by 30 points.  Any links to Watson being born in Sunderland are purely coincidental.