It is 20 years almost to the day since Newcastle last won English rugby’s domestic league title. Coincidentally, 1998 was also the year the iconic Angel of the North sculpture, designed by Antony Gormley, was erected in Gateshead. Both were towering achievements but, for a long time, just one of them seemed to have been built to last.
Only now are Newcastle Falcons beginning to stretch their muscular arms once again, guided by a man who has had an even more tumultuous couple of decades. As it happens Dean Richards also made his first foray into management with Leicester in 1998, taking over from Bob Dwyer, and subsequently leading them to four Premiership titles and two European Cups in four seasons. Dragging Newcastle up from the league’s nether regions on a modest budget has, in its own way, been equally impressive.
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The north-east will love him even more if the Falcons can beat Exeter at Sandy Park on Saturday and bring some northern soul to the Twickenham grand final next week. It will be a tall order but Richards, freshly crowned as the Premiership’s director of rugby of the season for the first time in 17 years, has never been a guru who believes in the obvious.
“There’s a joke going round that if you ever see Dean out on the field in his tracksuit with a whistle in his mouth take a photo because it’ll be worth an absolute fortune,” says the Falcons’ managing director, Mick Hogan. “In terms of rarity value it’s probably as priceless as a Van Gogh.”
More commonplace, according to Hogan, is the sight of the 54‑year‑old former England No 8 bobbing around in the North Sea rather than poring over match DVDs on his days off. “You’ll find him out at sea on his boat fishing. You’d think it must be a bloody strong boat, maybe some sort of decommissioned minesweeper, but apparently it’s a tiny little wooden thing. He loves the outdoor life and you get that in the north-east.”
In the same breath, though, Hogan will tell you why Richards has been pivotal to Newcastle’s steady rise since the club signed him in 2012 while he was still in the final months of a three-year ban following the infamous Bloodgate scandal. If moving to the north-east has helped to restore his reputation, he has done the same for the Falcons.
“He is absolutely central to it all,” says Hogan. “To me there are two areas where he’s particularly good. Number one: he’s the best recruiter in the game. It’s not just about finding unknowns or signing Niki Goneva … he gets it right at both ends of the spectrum.
“We plucked Tane Takulua from absolutely nowhere and I’d put him up there with any scrum-half in the league now. The other bit he gets is the importance of the academy. It’s very easy for the guy at the top to look week to week because they’re judged on results. Not many are looking at the 16- or 17-year-olds and wondering: ‘Are they going to come good in five years’ time?’ Dean does.”
Players of all vintages also relish his occasionally left-field methods. The former England captain Martin Corry, for example, still remembers the instant effect Richards had in his initial months at Leicester. “The transformation was remarkable. He felt the steeliness had gone out of the pack so he and John Wells announced they were going to start mauling against us at training. He always won.”
Then there were the off-field bonding initiatives. “When he first took over at Leicester he realised the spirit wasn’t what it should have been,” says Corry.
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“He got us all in to a function room and said: ‘Tell your wives and girlfriends you’re going to be here for two hours.’ He then paired up one back and one forward for a three-legged race around every bar in Welford Road, with the first pair back the winner. I think there were 16 bars and you had to have a drink in each of them.”
Some old-school habits have endured. Newcastle’s Scotland back-rower Ally Hogg, now in his last days before retirement, has spent eight years with the Falcons and recalls the club’s first big away win in Bristol under Richards after being relegated to the Championship. “We beat them down there and within five minutes we’d stopped at an off-licence and Dean was in buying beers for all the boys for the bus trip home. That was his thing: you had to make sure you bought your opposite number a pint after the game and on every away trip you’d have a few beers to bring everyone together. He has that old‑school mentality, which I think is key to building a good culture.”
Organising stop-offs for fish and chips at the Wetherby Whaler, though, has not been the only secret of Richards’s success. Bloodgate was a costly mistake but, as Corry points out, there were other elements to the story. “There was a time when everyone knew behaviour like that went on. We discussed it with England, Richard Cockerill admitted it [opening stitches in a finger wound] in his book. It’s a bit like kicking the Calcutta Cup down Princes Street; there was a time when that was regarded as funny. If it happened now it would be horrific. He’s made mistakes but you learn and change along the way.”
According to Corry, that could just be Richards’s most enduring quality. “What makes Deano great is that he’s adaptable. You’d never think he would move with the times, that he’d be the same old Deano, but he’s always managed to stay on top of the game. Look at how he’s come back from what happened at Harlequins. What he’s done at Newcastle is probably more impressive than what he did at Leicester. Yes there are plenty of anecdotes about him, but I think what he’s doing transcends that. You want to play for Dean, the club and your mates. It’s not just painting by numbers.”
If signing good players and persuading them to perform above their natural ability was easy, everyone would be doing it. The coaching input of Dave Walder, Micky Ward and Scott MacLeod should not be underestimated but Hogg also salutes Richards’s squad‑building acumen. “He picks players based on what he thinks the squad needs, whether it be a big unit to truck it up the middle or someone with a bit more deft skill. Sometimes it’s not always about the best players, it’s about combinations and how they complement each other.”
Should the Falcons upset Exeter it will be no surprise to anyone within Richards’s inner circle.