ANDY BULLon the London club's return to the top after Bloodgate, led by an Irishman with just the kind of attributes England need right now
IF THE shell-shocked men in suits at the English Rugby Football Union are looking for an insight into the art of running a modern rugby team, they could do worse than start by walking over to their office windows.
From there they should be able to see The Stoop, home to Harlequins. It has been two and a half years since Bloodgate, the scandal that cost ’Quins their director of rugby, Dean Richards, their club doctor, their club physiotherapist, and their chairman, Charles Jillings, who resigned. And what hurt just as much, they lost their reputation too. Their name was disgraced, and their brand all but untouchable.
Now that same club is top of the Premiership and unbeaten this season. With 12 wins in 12 matches, it has been the best start to a season by an English club in the professional era. They have done it with a side that is largely made up of English players – their elite squad list contains five men born overseas – many of whom have come up through the club’s academy.
They play Newcastle tomorrow, but looming beyond that is the prospect of a home-and-away double header against Toulouse in the Heineken Cup, and then what the club call “the Big Game”, against Saracens at Twickenham on December 27th. As things stand that would be first versus second in the Premiership table, in front of what Harlequins hope will be a crowd of 72,000, the largest ever assembled for an English league game.
No wonder that their new director of rugby, Conor O’Shea, is spitting feathers about the leaked reviews that have been splashed across the papers this week. It is not just that the trust of the players was broken that irks him, or that by taking the plum quotes the press had stripped the review of its proper context. It is the impression that has been given of the sport to the wider public.
“For the people who just read this stuff for the first time it is all so unreflective of what rugby is about and that’s the disappointment that all of us have.”
England, he thinks, have reached “the bottom of the barrel”. It was not so long ago that you could have said the same about ’Quins.
So how did they turn their club around? One of the first things they did was take time to find the right man to take charge. O’Shea, the former Ireland fullback and managing director of London Irish, took over at the end of March 2010.
Tellingly, between leaving London Irish and starting at Harlequins, O’Shea had been working outside rugby, at the English Institute of Sport (EIS). The club has a new chief executive, David Ellis, who took over after Mark Evans left this summer.
Ellis was a lifelong fan who used to train at The Stoop when he was a schoolboy, but his career has been in marketing and business development. He spent time in San Francisco working for a dotcom company, worked in telecoms and, more recently, social housing. Ellis says that his background means that he comes to the job with an “open mind and a fresh pair of eyes, free of any preconceptions”.
This week the British sports minister, Hugh Robertson, said that the RFU Board was “stuck in a previous era” and needed to look for input from other fields of sport and business to help make the transition to the modern age.
“The message to rugby is ‘don’t feel that the whole world is against you’,” said Robertson. “Make use of that expertise that is around elsewhere, ally it to the knowledge that you have at Twickenham.”
The report commissioned by the RFU from the legal firm Slaughter and May into the way the English rugby is run has made similar recommendations.
O’Shea talks enthusiastically about his time at the EIS. “I have been in rugby all my life, so it was brilliant to spend a couple of years seeing how other people work, what budget constraints they work under and what programmes they put in place.”
It made him realise two things. The first was how keen he was to stay involved in the game he loved, and the second was how well-resourced rugby union was in comparison to other sports.
“It was of massive value to me. It opened my eyes to how lucky we are in terms of the resources we have. We are in a privileged place. There are a lot of athletes who sacrifice a heck of a lot for absolutely nothing. Sometimes we get cocooned and start thinking: ‘wow, we don’t get as much as we should’. Well, we get a heck of a lot, so be thankful for what you have got.”
That attitude seemed to have trickled down to his players. The club’s 25-year-old captain, Chris Robshaw, signed a three-year contract extension in May, despite being offered more money to join rival clubs. Robshaw acknowledges if the players do not take care then the public might start to see them as more akin to some modern footballers, spoiled by a sense of entitlement and arrogance.
“I think that has happened with the professional era,” Robshaw says. “Rightly or wrongly that is the life that we now live. It is about knowing how to behave when you are in the limelight and out in the public eye. And especially having that understanding of what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing when you are representing yourself, your club and your sponsors.” His words contrast sharply with the deeds of some of England’s senior players during the World Cup.
Bloodgate could have broken Robshaw’s generation of ’Quins players, but he believes it is what made them. If you respond to it well, adversity can have a galvanising effect. The scandal “was very hard on the inside, but it was also an eye-opener”, he says. “Did it have an effect on everyone at the club? Probably. But it drew the players closer together. Our performances weren’t great at the time, but we dug in and stuck together. It was as though it was us against the rest of the world, so to speak. And the first thing was in order to get back from it we had to be playing well and winning games, simple as that.”
When O’Shea arrived at the club, he was not burdened or bothered by what had gone on before he joined. “I thought I was incredibly fortunate because it was a really well-run club and that it had a great record.”
He says that the “incredible amount of work that Tony Diprose and Colin Osborne have done with the academy” is why the club’s ethos is what it is. O’Shea did not seek to stamp his authority on the club from the start, and it is easy to see from the way he talks to Robshaw and gives so much credit to the other coaches and players that he is not an egotist.
“I’d have made a bit of a fool of myself if I had come in without knowing the people or exactly what is going on and started making sweeping statements about how things should be,” O’Shea says. “They’ll look at you and say ‘well, you don’t actually know me so what the hell are you talking about?’”
He was lucky, he says, because he joined with six matches still to play in the season while there was little pressure on him or the team. “I could take a view and get to know the guys and see Chris up close and personal and decide, ‘yeah that’s the person I want to captain the side’.”
The strong sense you get from talking to O’Shea is that while he is open to modern methods in both business and sport, he is a real rugby man.
“This club is not just about what happened two years ago,” O’Shea says. “Or about what happens this year. This club is about over 100 years of history, 2016 will be our 150th year. These players want to make history for this club, so that when they move on and leave this jersey behind them, their names will be up there on the walls as people who have worn it before them.”
It is Ellis’s job to combine those values with the business side of the club. Harlequins are not profitable, but they are bubbling just under.
“There is a lot of pressure out there to be more commercial,” Ellis says. “But you have to keep hold of your values when you are making these decisions, so you don’t lose sight of what you are, what you have been and what you are trying to achieve. At the same time rugby clubs in general aren’t making money.”
And Ellis can count on O’Shea not taking the short trip across to Twickenham for now
“I’ve said no and I mean no,” concludes O’Shea. “ Hopefully, we are at the start of something, right now we have achieved nothing.”
They are the words of a man of integrity, something that would not go amiss in the England set-up at the moment.
