London Irish v London Welsh Preview

By Mark W-J
April 18 2013

It hasn’t been the best of weeks for London Welsh. Kelvin Bryon’s rant in Sunday’s press was swiftly followed by a record tenth consecutive league defeat which confirmed relegation back to the Championship as a mathematical certainty. The fall-out from Kelvin’s announcement has led to uncertainty over where we’ll be playing next season - and, worse, whether we will still be playing next season.

Our defeat to Northampton on Sunday afternoon precipitated a palpable sense of relief over on the London Irish chat board. Sale’s bonus point win over Gloucester on Friday night saw them leapfrog our fellow Exiles, who then enjoyed a twelve point advantage with just two games left, while we were targeting three wins from our three remaining fixtures in order to overhaul them and save ourselves. Although we dared to dream when Nick Scott finished off Sonny Parker’s interception after half an hour, the Saints duly restored order and marched to an ultimately comfortable victory to send us back whence we came. Yet in the cold light of day you’d hope that the Irish fans wouldn’t be happy with merely avoiding relegation, and will be wondering not only where it went wrong (again) but who is going to put it right - and how, and when? This is a club which finished as runners-up to Leicester in the Premiership Grand Final just four years ago and had lost to Toulouse in a Heineken Cup semi-final by six points twelve months previously. This is a club whose Academy has produced young English talent such as Jonathan Joseph, Marland Yarde, Guy Armitage, Alex Corbisiero, Max Lahiff, Matt Garvey, Jon Fisher and Jack Moates, the vast majority of whom have played in the Championship for London Welsh either on-loan or on a dual-registered basis. Yet Armitage left last summer to join his brothers at Toulon, only to return in the autumn, while Joseph, Garvey and Moates are all heading for pastures new this summer - the first two to join their former mentors, Toby Booth and Neal Hatley at Bath, the latter to Wasps. Factor in the departure of Shaun Edwards after less than six months in an admittedly part-time role as defence coach, plus the try-scoring exploits of former winger Adam Thompstone at Leicester, and you have to wonder what’s going wrong down at Sunbury. The heavy plant has moved in to Hazelwood Golf Club, the site of the new state-of-the-art training centre a couple of hundred yards (as the crow flies) from their traditional site in The Avenue, and it’s hoped that this is the first step in a business plan which will see the club re-establish themselves as a force in English and - ultimately - European rugby.

Marlon Yarde - one of Irish's
impressive prospects

The fallout from the weekend’s events - Kelvin’s front page rant in the Rugby Paper, closely followed by rumours of his resignation (along with that of John Taylor) from the board, plus the departure of Tony Copsey, after just three months as CEO - has overshadowed some of the platitudes from players, coaches and journalists at the end of our season in the sun. Jim Mallinder described us as ‘a credit to the Premiership’ while the Telegraph’s Mick Cleary said we had ‘brought value to the league’ and applauded the way that we were ‘throwing the ball around to the very end on Sunday, raging against the dying of the light’; and his counterpart at the Guardian, Robert Kitson, agreed, saying ‘Lyn Jones's side were good to watch right to the end’. But unfortunately everyone is focussing on the negatives - the £2.2m loss for the season reported in Tuesday’s Evening Standard, despite the fact that the financial year has over two months left to run; the question marks over the financial viability of remaining in Oxford for next season, and, ludicrously, suggestions on some chat boards that we would be unable to raise a team for our final two fixtures due to our precarious fiscal position..

The positive comments from outside the club, however, cannot mask the fact that our primary objective - our sole objective - was Premiership survival, and in that respect we have failed. Ten consecutive defeats for the first time in league rugby is undoubtedly a major disappointment, and with only six wins in 32 games to-date (20 league, six Amlin, four B&I Cup and two friendlies) we are enjoying (if that’s the right word) our worst season in terms of the percentage of games won for over a hundred years. Victories over Irish and Worcester would increase the win ratio to 23.5%, but of the ten seasons in which we’ve won less than 30% of our games, nine were in the 19^th Century, and just one - seven wins and two draws from 34 games in 1922-23 - in the last 100 years. The fewest number of wins in a season is actually none - the club was disbanded at the end of that 1887-88 season, only to be reformed twelve months later; there’s an omen we could do without…

Tom Homer slots three points
against Wasps

From a London Irish point of view, Saturday represents a chance to end a disappointing season on a high in front of their own supporters. The fixture list made them look like relegation candidates for several months, but with Wasps, Worcester, Sale and Welsh all scheduled to visit Reading in the closing seven rounds it was always likely that they would pull away from the bottom at exactly the right moment. These games became increasingly important as they have the worst away record in the Premiership, with just five points collected on their travels - an 18-12 win at Kingsholm in January, and a solitary losing bonus point from their trip to Oxford. At the start of February Brian Smith targeted 20 points from their five remaining home fixtures to ensure their Premiership survival, and they duly beat Saracens, Wasps and Worcester before inexplicably drawing 33-33 with Sale three weeks ago, the Sharks collecting their first try bonus of the season in the process. Those dropped points, coupled with those gained by one of their nearest rivals, contributed to the heart palpitations that were experienced last weekend, and there is still a chance that they could end the season in 11^th place, which would represent their worst season since they finished 13^th of 14 clubs in 1997-98 and had to endure a relegation play-off against Rotherham. They have the second-worst try scoring stats in the division with 28 (five more than Welsh) but their top try-scorer is Tongan international tighthead Halani Aulika, signed from Leeds last summer, with four, with the club’s record try scorer, Topsy Ojo, and Guy Armitage - the only player to appear for London Irish, London Scottish and London Welsh - joint second on three apiece. Of all twelve Premiership clubs, Irish have the joint-lowest-scoring top try-scorer (if that makes sense) - Bath’s top try scorer also has four, although they have three players (Horacio Agulla, Tom Biggs and Kyle Eastmond) sharing the title. No club has scored fewer tries away from home than London Irish - just six in ten games - while both of our clubs have conceded 31 second-half tries, the highest in the Premiership. Tom Homer has kicked 101 points, significantly down on the 259 he managed last season to top the charts, but he has shared front-line kicking duties with Ian Humphreys (80) and Steve Shingler (71). Gordon Ross has scored 147 points, which equates to 42% of our total of 351 - Andy Goode is responsible for an astonishing 55% of all points scored by Worcester in the Premiership this season.

Thirty years ago, in March 1983, the owner of Oxford United, Robert Maxwell, announced that he was going to buy the entire shareholding of Reading FC for just over £200,000 and merge the two clubs to form Thames Valley Royals. In Maxwell’s own words: 'Oxford United has only one choice. Either it becomes part of something bigger and more modern on a beautiful site with a new stadium and a leisure centre, within reasonable distance of our people, or else there will be no Oxford United possible at the beginning of next season'. The supporters of the two clubs were outraged, as you might expect, and the plans were quietly shelved - but you can’t help drawing parallels with the fortunes of the rugby clubs who currently groundshare with those two football clubs. Fifteen years ago Richmond and London Scottish were effectively taken over by London Irish, although the merger/ acquisition was forced through by the RFU against the wishes of all parties, and the other two clubs returned to the Athletic Ground to start again at bottom of the pyramid, from where they have both thrived. If the doom-mongers are to be believed, a similar fate awaits London Welsh this summer. Those people who opposed our promotion last summer will point out that if we had had our own stadium and leisure centre, if we had planned for promotion both off and on the field as Worcester and Exeter had done before us, then maybe we wouldn’t be trying to sidestep talk of facing administration for the second time in four years; maybe we might have actually stood a chance of avoiding relegation. But despite all of the obstacles in our way - some of them, admittedly, of our own making - we can be proud of what our club has achieved this season. Most people, if we’re honest, expected the season to end in relegation, although when we beat the Irish in December we dared to dream that survival was a realistic outcome. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, but with two games remaining - against teams with nothing to play for, possibly looking to put their own annus horribilis behind them - the players have two final chances to add their own footnotes to the proud history of London Welsh.

London Irish v London Welsh Preview

Posted by: The Dragons' Den (IP Logged)

Date: 18/04/2013 10:15

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