MarkH takes a long hard look - and doesn't like it

By Mark Hazell
February 22 2005

You Won’t Like This, But… Someone's got to stand up and say it, so I will. Saints will finish bottom of the Zurich Premiership this season and end up playing in the first division next season.

This is not a new feeling of mine either; with eight matches left, I thought that four wins were needed to offer an even chance of surviving, with two wins coming from the first batch of four matches (Sarries, Wasps, Tiggs, Glaws), and two from the last four (Quins, Bath, Falcons and Wuss). Those four from eight have now become four from six, at the very least, and I don't think it's possible. Why?

At the moment, survival is still in our own hands - just. A win over Quins, and matching points in the remaining games will clinch eleventh spot; an eleventh spot at the moment that appears to be the limit (and should be, in my view) of all ambitions this season. It's not that easy though - Bath entertain Quins on Saturday without a front row, a back row or any centres (due to injury and international call ups), so it's very much a case of fingers crossed that they can do us a favour. In all likelihood, Saints may be seven points adrift at five o'clock on Saturday, with just five games left, and that, my friends, is just too far to make up.

Why am I saying this now? Well, there seems to have been an unshakeable belief that things will go right, we're too good to go down, something will happen in the first division to help us, there are worse teams in the division.

Reality check people!

Things haven't gone right all season, so why should it change now? The "bounce of the ball" is oft quoted as what's put us in this position, and that when it bounces our way things will turn around. To correct that, things will only turn around if we're good enough to take advantage of it, and if it happens at the right time - it would have been pointless, for example, to suddenly get the bounce of the ball 39-9 down at the Causeway; better to have had it at 21-20 down at home to Sarries.

The "too good to go down" line is trawled out in football whenever a big club struggles, almost as if the media and that club's supporters can't bring themselves to believe what a mess the club is in.  Northampton Saints 2004/05 vintage is not "too good to go down", in fact at the moment we're the worst team in the Premiership and that's reflected in the league position. In a team, you're only as good as your worst member, or to look at it another way, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Why do you think Anne Robinson's programme holds such a morbid fascination?  Answer - because people like seeing other people struggle and end up humiliated.

Why do they never win the maximum amount of money on that programme? Answer - because it's a combination of individuals not being as good as they think they are, plus the fact that a bad team comes about when people don't work together.

In a rugby perspective, think Wasps and Leicester. Wasps were successful last season because they believed in each other and found a common goal, of being the best they could be and taking what could prove to be a chance in a lifetime of being the best in Europe. Leicester's mentality is somewhat different, in that even when they know they are on top (as in Saturday's stuffing of the hapless Falcons), they become greedy, they want more, but they stay structured in trying to get it and follow the gameplan they set out for themselves.

Both sides also play without fear of failure, thinking more of the treasure at the end of the road rather than the consequences of defeat. As Corne Krige points out in the Chron today, teams that accentuate the positive rather than dwell on the negative tend to be those that thrive. We saw back in December and early January what self-belief could do, with six wins in seven games threatening to turn the season round. So where's the self-belief gone?

To be honest, I don't think it's ever been there since those first two games of the season. Whatever Alan Solomons said to a group of the players to destroy their confidence (and it's been mentioned by some of the players themselves that they felt unwanted), certainly wrecked the first half of the season, and I believe that it's still lacking now. Look back at those six games again:-

Toulouse took us for granted, felt they could play some of their back up players, and paid the penalty as the team produced their best performance for about two years (I'd also factor in the Budge and Grays first home game and first since the sacking of Solomons elements).

Bedford were certainly up for it, but superior fitness and premiership class eventually told.

London Irish showed a complete lack of ambition, and thought that all they need to do was to kick penalties and drop goals; if one of those drop goals were converted to a try, then that match would have slipped by too.

Leeds basically came with the wrong game plan, and ended up having to try and play catch up in the torrential conditions in the second half.

Llanelli were, at that point, a shadow of their former selves, and knew that they had to win to have any chance of qualifying. An excellent defensive performance and an admirable lack of panic brought the away win (the second of those having been missing for a lot of the season).

Glasgow, where the task was to score four tries, and where it took forty minutes of fear before turning the game around.

Since then, four defeats, each with an increasing amount of frustration.  The home defeat tally for this season now stands at seven, and as the Tigers found out last season, once one team works out how to win at what is supposed to be a fortress, every team realises that there's nothing special about a ground, no "aura" to overcome - just fifteen men. The players, to me, still don't look like they believe in each other, looking just as they were during the worst days of Solomons. That is no fault of Budge, Grays, or to an extent the players themselves, but when you're told that you're not good enough to play for the club and have no future, you can go one of two ways. That may well be Solomons' legacy.

The change in management, although badly needed, won't have helped the team either. Much has been made of trying to get back to the Wayne Smith ethos and style, but what hasn't been pointed out is that there are a large number of players at the club who weren't part of the that original style, so not only have the remaining squad members from last season had to re-adjust, but the newcomers have had to switch to what, for them, is another new style of playing just months after learning what this season's gameplan (deliberately singular, I should point out) would be. It will come; we all remember the days in Smithy's first season when it went wrong (Glasgow away, Sale at home, the cup final, and on the beach at Bristol), but it's taking longer than anyone wanted for it to come right.

Can anyone honestly say that of the other four teams in that group at the bottom, that any of the four are unexpected? Worcester have surprised everyone outside the city by playing as a team (I certainly didn't expect them to get the seven wins that you seem to need to stay up), but for however well they've played, they're still among the strugglers. Irish don't score enough tries to win as many games as they should, whilst Quins and Leeds both struggled last season and haven't taken step up consistently (Leeds in the cups are a different matter, but then maybe they see these as a more straightforward way of getting to Europe).

There's always one "big" club that struggle too - Tigers last season, Bath for two years before.  This time round, it’s our turn.  Next year, it’ll probably be someone else.  Just as the Bath and Leicester supporters were, we’re now the butt of the jokes.  But are we helping the situation?  Personally, I think not.  I’m tense when I’m going to games now, and I’m sure that I’m not the only one; I’m also sure that our tension is transmitting to the players as well.  And so, we’re back to the fear of playing rugby again.  I’d be naïve to think that come Saturday, there’s going to be twelve thousand people walking into the ground expecting a Saints win, but unless we become realistic, we’re not going to help.  As the situation becomes more desperate, we will get more desperate as individuals.  Players will make mistakes (I maintain that the worst point of this season came in the Leeds cup tie), and invariably, there’ll be moans from the crowd.  Mistakes will still happen; we can stop the moaning though.  Remember how good it felt during and after the Toulouse game?  That’ll be nothing if we stay up.

 

There was, on this site, a firm belief that when Budge and Grays took over, that European qualification was still a probability, let alone a possibility.  It hasn’t worked out like that.  After the Newcastle game, their first match in charge, I would have been happy just to survive.  Do we, as supporters, put too much pressure on?  Are we expecting too much from this team instead of being realistic, and when things don’t go right, do we express our feelings a bit too vocally?  A friend of mine, who stands in C Block, has now said to me that he’s now watching games with his mouth shut, because if he expresses his true feelings, he’ll end up in an argument with someone - whether they be positive or negative views.

 

What, aside from the grumbles, won’t help are delusions that “this isn’t happening”, “they wouldn’t dare relegate us with our ground”, “there will be a fudge”, etc.  What better way to increase the profile of the first division, and in turn prove that no-one is immune, for Saints to be playing there next season?  Any sort of fudge would be an absolute disgrace, and an insult to both the first division clubs and Worcester, as I’ve got absolutely no doubt that if the Warriors were three points adrift at the bottom right now, then there’d be no talk of escape routes and back doors.  Instead, we’d have “oh, once again the promoted club can’t cut it”.

 

They can cut it.  They have cut it.  They cut us to shreds.

 

So go forward one year.  Saints have dropped, Exeter (for arguments sake) have gone up and finish eleventh.  Another “big” club have finished bottom.  The fudge issue comes up again, and the RFU change the rules; we finish top and don’t come up.  Prepare yourselves for the biggest court case in rugby history.  So why shouldn’t it be the same this season?  Whoever wins the first will have done it on the pitch; we haven’t, wherever we finish this time around.  Bottom deserves to drop.

 

That will no doubt be sorted out in the boardroom, which is where the problem started.  Solomons has cost us £220,000 already; he may cost us a lot more than that, but then if he’d been disposed of even a week earlier, would we be bottom?  Would that one point defeat to London Irish have been a one point win?  If action had come sooner, we might not be in as big a mess, and the responsibility for that decision has to lie right at the top.

 

Uncle Keith talked on Rugby Club of completing a hat-trick of making a million pounds profit, winning the Heineken Cup, and getting relegated.  Right now, I’d swap the five wins in Europe for three wins in the league, and here’s the next question. 

 

You have a Heineken Cup quarter final that most experts do not expect you to win.  Eight days later, you have a crucial away game at Bath.  Which is the bigger game, and which do you concentrate on?  The hazards of being a coach, and I don’t want to be Budge making that decision.  To me, at the moment, I’d concentrate on the league game.  If we go down, we can’t defend the Heineken Cup.

 

Having said all this, knowing Saints then Leicester, Gloucester and Quins will all have been turned over by the quarter-final, and people will be throwing this article back in my face.  I hope they do.  I just have this fear at the moment though that the last game at Worcester will mean nothing; that Newcastle will have sent us down two weeks before, in front of the Sky cameras and a gloating Stuart Barnes.

 

I’m hurting at the moment, and I’m hurting badly.  Opening my eyes to the reality now may help any pain that I may suffer in April.

 

To the players - prove me wrong.  Please.