Look West Young Man!
By Loosehead
June 6 2006
With preparations now underway for life in National Division 1, the club will also need to keep one eye on the Premiership for our next crack when we get promotion back into the top flight.
Whilst the club appear to be making the right noises about support, new players and producing more home grown talent, we still need to push onto the next level to move from a team that was in the bottom 4 for most of their time in the Premiership to a mid table side then hopefully onto to a Top 4 side.
However all of this is still a few years away - albeit hopefully for a top 4 side. So how would the club go about doing this? well I think we need to take a look at our cousins across the Pennines in Cheshire. Sale Sharks have managed to bounce back from relegation during the early-mid 90's to European Trophy winners, (Parker Pen) to a top 4 Premiership side and finally, to Premiership Championship winners within 10 years.
In some ways we mirror Sale; you only need to look at the season 2000/2001 when with their high profile signing Jason Robinson they were getting crowds of between 2000-3000. Yes they were still at Heywood Road but it was still only around half their capacity, even during our 1st season in the Premiership 2001/2002 we were drawing better crowds than Sale for some home games. It wasn't until the following season when the crowds started to grow significantly that Sale moved on to Edgley Park. Looking at the growth of attendance from the 2000/2001 season when they only managed to get 2980 in to watch them beat Bath, yet within 3 years and the move to Stockport their crowd grew to almost almost treble that at 8105.
So you may ask where am I going with this besides showing how Sale have managed to increase the attendance? Like I said in some ways we mirror Sale we are both in an area where Rugby Union can be classed as the 3rd sport behind Soccer and Rugby League. Both have signed some big names from the world of Rugby - Sale signed Robinson a household Rugby league name we signed a former All Black in Justin Marshall and British Lions Gordon Bulloch and Iain Balshaw.
Sale promoted from within with the likes of Jim Mallinder & Steve Diamond both former Sale stalwarts who managed to guide the club from the lower end of the Premiership into a top 4 side with some enterprising free flowing Rugby, 2 very good very young wingers and a very strong mobile set of forwards. We have just appointed our new Director of Rugby who was also a Leeds stalwart we too have a pair of young exciting wingers in Biggs and Welding and the makings of a very mobile pack.
So the big question is how do we make the leap to the next level?
I believe the club has already done this by appointing Stu Lancaster a promising young coach who I believe has the very future of the Tykes close to his heart. Yes he may lack experience at coaching at the top level but so did Clive Woodward when he took charge of Henley in 1990/91 yet 12 year later he led England to World Cup glory at the 2003 World Cup! Whilst I am not saying that Lancaster is the man that will necessarily win us the Premiership or European Cup (he may well do) he is the man to take the club onto the next level and is usually the case to go forwards you sometimes first have to take a step or 2 backwards before you move on.