As this is the season not to be a curmudgeon, I’d like to welcome Wasps to the Midlands. A look at the map suggests that if there are geographical issues to be had they are more to the east of Coventry, but it is an area which is big enough to accommodate another rugby club.
Discussions about academies – we at Worcester have spent about a million pounds setting up four, one of them at Barkers’ Butts Rugby Club in Coventry – and the like are for the future. For the moment I’m not speaking as a director of rugby at a club just along the M42 and down the M5, but as a former Wasp with considerable affection for his old club and its DNA.
To understand any concerns you have to know where I come from and that is a patch of green in the middle of a housing estate in Sudbury, Wasps’ home in north-west London from 1923 and a ground where even the rosiest of rosetinted spectacles would find it hard to remember days when gates averaged more than 2,000 – quite a few of them in a stand I helped to build during a quiet summer after returning from New Zealand.
For me the arrival of professionalism meant not having to train three nights a week under a torch strapped to the top of a scaffold pole. From 1996-97 onwards all training was in daylight hours and there was even a chance that some of us would be wearing matching tracksuits rather than the job lot which had been begged, borrowed or stolen.
Remarkably, we did quite well. In fact we were the first champions of the professional era. However, that should not disguise what we were. If Harlequins in west London were the side of the City and its brokers, we were a more motley mix; students with a strong Cambridge link, builders, office workers and ex-servicemen like me.
If Rob Smith was the coach, it wasn’t necessarily his gameplan that was implemented. There were some strong voices, guys such as Jeff Probyn, Paul Rendall, Andy Dun, Rob Andrew, Fran Clough, Chris Oti, Steve Bates and a young Lawrence Dallaglio. All had their own ideas and all of them took them on to the pitch which made success all the more remarkable.
There was a feeling that what came did so despite ourselves and that Wasps was a natural home for the disaffected; for those not loved elsewhere, something which transferred first to Loftus Road and then on to the home they have just left, Adams Park in High Wycombe – another patch of green in a strange place; industrial estate on one side, open country on the other, game birds often pecking the turf even as the punters started to arrive.
Rob Andrew, Steve Bates and me were long gone by then, headed for Newcastle where Sir John Hall was eagerly embracing professionalism whereas Wasps, at best, were learning to cope. However, I was at Adams Park not so long ago and, just as there were plenty of faces I recognised from half a dozen years at Sudbury, the atmosphere was also comfortably familiar. For a start you could never accuse Wasps of being tainted by success. Even when they made 10 finals in a decade, winning the lot including a couple of Heineken Cups and three league titles on the trot in the remarkably successful era brought on by Warren Gatland and Shaun Edwards, it was rare that Adams Park ever got uncomfortably full. Quite the opposite in fact and if the move to the Ricoh brings stability then it is to be applauded.
Not so long ago the very real prospect of relegation could have snuffed the club out for ever. This week Nick Eastwood, the chief executive, recounted how two years ago they had precisely £65.16 in the bank and a £1m demand from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in the in-tray.
So what are my worries? With several days still to go more than 27,000 tickets have been sold for Sunday’s first game at the Ricoh and Dai Young is building a competitive and entertaining side which is not only at Europe’s top table, but making a good fist of attempting to make the play-offs. As a coach with the possibility of new-found wealth, he is saying precisely the right things about growing a side rather than buying one. In fact Wasps are no longer tenants of a football side, as they were at both Loftus Road and High Wycombe; they’re the landlords.
The only niggling worry is that the move 83 miles north is the closest thing I can remember to a rugby union club being franchised.
Rugby tends to do quite well when hanging on to its DNA. Despite transition, clubs tend to retain their character and if Wasps hang on to theirs, so well and good. The Ricoh is a long way from being the worst football stadium to house a rugby team, but to make it feel like home to a side which was happiest when feeling like a bunch of urchins, Wasps not only have to find new friends in the Midlands but persuade the faithful to make the journey north on an ongoing basis.
I wish them the best.