Dean Richards

Dean Richards crept up to the telephone box unnoticed. The man inside had a sawn-off shotgun he was threatening to use on a former lover, but the number eight took him by surprise, pinning and disarming him in the process. This was life as a ‘bobby’ in the 1980s, so no wonder professional rugby was a breeze.

The nine-year-old goalkeeper had showed promise: he was a good size for his age, could catch a ball and was, strong; perhaps the only thing was he could get distracted. He’d earned a trial for Leicester West, a good side in the area, but some things are more important than football – like conkers. During the match, during the kind of lull you often get from under-10s football, the promising goalie decided the allure of the nearby conker tree was too great to resist any longer. Abandoning his goal, he ran off the pitch to fill his pockets with conkers: there were definitely a few sixers in there, maybe even a sevener, to help him win in the playground.

While the opposition didn’t score during his unauthorised conker-gathering mission, the selectors noticed his absence and, unimpressed, the football career of Dean Richards was brought to an end.

Instead, he turned to rugby. He first played the game at age eleven and by his mid-teens, Dean was playing in the morning for John Cleveland College and would then walk a mile or so along Leicester Road to Hinckley Rugby Club where he would often find himself being asked to turn out for the 4th or 5th XV. Which makes it a fitting place for us to meet the former Leicester number eight, who still resides in the north-east after ten years as director of rugby at Newcastle, but is back home to visit his parents, who still live in the midlands.

Picking up the assorted threads of his life-story once again, education wasn’t top of his priorities. It was 1981, a time of recession, when one in three school-leavers aged under eighteen were out of work. And Dean decided against A-levels. “I didn’t take them because I didn’t turn up for them. But I told my parents I had,” he explains. “They were expecting me to be a rocket scientist or a dentist or whatever. You know, as parents do.

“I didn’t suit academia at all in those days,” he continues. “All I loved doing was playing sport and I was lucky that I was reasonably good at rugby. I was a late school-year child, born in July. So, just before my 18th birthday, I went over to France and through a family friend I got a contract over there to play for Roanne.

 “I went over there with the intention of playing for a year. Unbeknown to my parents, I just wanted to be as far away from them as possible before the A-level results came out!”  

That experience, however, was to be the making of him. “You learn to stand on your feet very fast,” he says. “In those days, there were very few English-speaking people in that area of France or in France generally.

“I worked as a cabbie’s mate, I worked in a car factory, I cleaned buses. It’s an experience that you probably wouldn’t get today. I grew up very, very quickly. I came back home the following March and all my mates said, ‘you’re a different person’, which I probably was, yeah.”

Working in a factory meant picking up quite a lot of industrial language, which came back to haunt him some years later. “Yeah, it wasn’t quite the perfect French that you’d expect,” he laughs. “When I played [for England] in Paris, the French president came over to me and said, ‘I believe you played in France a few years ago’. We had a conversation for about half an hour and he said ‘Oh, your French is really good’. I said, ‘thank you’ and then he said, ‘but you do swear a lot!’.”

Mention French rugby and the 1980s to anyone who remembers that period and it tends to conjure up two images. One is of the exceptional players, such as Jean-Pierre Rives, Serge Blanco, Philippe Sella, Patrice Lagisquet et al. The other is how physical they were – physical meaning violent. Yet even by Gallic standards, Roanne had a bad reputation, and it wasn’t just the players. During a local derby match against Digoin, the brawling on the pitch spilled over, with a touch judge being sent off for hitting somebody over the head with a flagpole, while an old lady attacked the ref with her umbrella.

Dean forged friendships in Roanne that remain to this day. “A couple of years ago, there was a 60th birthday party over in France and we all had to dress up as characters out of Asterix,” he remembers. Naturally, he dressed as Obelix.

When he returned to Hinckley in the spring of 1982, Dean needed to find a job and as an eighteen-year-old he was old enough to join the police force in May of that year. 

If you search online you’ll find pictures of Dean issuing parking tickets, or behind the wheel of a ‘panda’, as police cars were known back then. He looks like a stereotypical teenage ‘bobby on the beat’ from that era; the type that would get called out to rescue a cat stuck up a tree, a la Rosie, the ITV sitcom from that period about a fresh-faced rookie officer, with a theme tune that went, “When he’s proudly on the beat, the women all shout, ‘he’s too young to be out!’”

A hark back to a simpler time, as they say. 

Indeed, my idea was to ask Dean about his time as a policeman, half wondering if we would get an amusing anecdote from it. Instead, an altogether different story emerges. Again, it is one that shaped Dean’s outlook both on and off the pitch. “There weren’t masses of divisions that you have now with drugs squads, fire  squads, murder squads,” he says. “So, you would become a regular bobby, or eventually join the CID or become part of the incident response unit and that was pretty much it. I spent my first two years as a bobby in Hinckley and then came the miners’ strike…” 

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the strike, perhaps the single most important event to happen on British soil during the 1980s. If you were a police officer you suddenly became a member of Thin Blue Line separating the working miners from the flying pickets who turned up at collieries to not only protest but also vent their anger at those who defied their brothers (both figuratively and sometimes literally) and continued to work.

“I went to France
to play for a year, unbeknown to my parents, I just wanted to be as far away from them as possible when the A-level results came out!”  

There were clear divides between the counties on where they stood on the strike. In Yorkshire, they fully supported it. In Leicestershire, nearly everyone continued to work, except for a group known as ‘The Dirty Thirty’. One of the controversies leading up to the strike was that a report had been published stating that Cortonwood Colliery near Rotherham was profitable, which kicked off a huge row in parliament. Then a group of auditors were brought in to look at Cortonwood and stated that the report was a work of fiction and it should be closed. Yet there were plenty of other collieries operating at a profit and the miners felt compelled to act before closing Cortonwood created a domino effect. That’s the short version. Of course, on reflection, the strike was delaying the inevitable, but it became a battle for the soul of Britain, between the workers and the state. Dean was a man caught in the middle. “Both of my grandfathers were miners so it’s sort of inbred in the family,” he says. “So you have all sorts of mixed feelings about it. While you’re there doing a job, you have a huge amount of empathy for the miners.

“Then we would get the Met (Police coming up from London),” he continues. “We saw a lot of the Met around our area and their reaction to it and their behaviour wasn’t particularly great, which caused a lot of angst and unrest among the local bobbies. The politics behind it was dreadful on both sides and how it played out was awful.”

But, for the most part, policing the strike was rather mundane. “You would get up ready for a shift at 2am, get in the back of a van not knowing where you were going, but knowing you had to be there by 6am, turn up, do a shift, go home and then get up the next day and do the same thing.”

By this time, he had established himself as a first-choice player at Leicester. Playing rugby at the weekend must have provided a welcome distraction from the routine of spending up to eight to ten hours a day in the back of a van. “It was difficult actually because I couldn’t get to training unless we were sent to a colliery in Leicestershire because of ‘The Dirty Thirty’,” he says. “I think I put on two stone during the strike.”

Every so often he would find himself in a situation where he had to put his life on the line. On one occasion, when Dean was on patrol, a woman had dialled 999 to say that a man had rung her from a telephone kiosk, threatening to kill her and her husband, and was armed with a sawn-off shotgun. She was married and apparently had had an affair with this man. Dean went to the phone box, managed to sneak up unnoticed, open the door and surprise the man, then pin him against the side of it and prevent him from unloading his gun. 

He says his police work developed aspects of his mindset, which then helped in his rugby career.  “You sort of become a little bit blasé about certain things; you know, something may happen in a game but you can move on quickly from it,” he says. “[When you are doing police work] You also have to compute things very quickly. You have to make a split-second decision, when somebody opens that door, as to what’s going on. It may be an old granny, or a guy who’s 22 with a knife in his hand. You have to work out the situation in a fraction of a second. Why is he holding that knife?

“I think it helps you to understand situations and make decisions a bit quicker.” 

Dean was one of four policemen, along with Wade Dooley, Paul Ackford and Martin Bayfield, to play for England in the period when they won three Grand Slams between 1991 and 1995. There was also Tim Rodber and captain Will Carling, who had both served in the army, and looking back Dean believes having that background in the services unquestionably benefited the team. “And it was the bonds within the team at that time, which probably made it special,” he adds. “Everybody went training and then went to work afterwards. We had people bringing different life-experiences to the table. And so the dialogue and conversations were never just about one thing.”

“You have to make a split-second decision, when somebody opens that door  ... It may be an old granny, or a guy who’s 22 with a knife in his hand.”

Perhaps the biggest regret from his playing career was not of his own making, but the fact England made the same mistake twice at the 1987 and 1995 World Cups by taking time off when they should have been gearing up for crucial knockout matches – resulting in them losing to Wales 16-3 in the ’87 quarter-final, followed by a dismantling from the All Blacks in the ’95 semi-final.

Dean even suggested to England manager Jack Rowell that going off to the Sun City resort in South Africa before that 1995 semi-final may not be the best idea and that the squad could always have an extended holiday after the tournament had ended. England also allowed the WAGs to join them in South Africa, something that the All Blacks wouldn’t permit.

Whether it would have stopped Jonah Lomu from running riot for New Zealand is a moot point. He was a relatively unknown quantity going into the tournament, and there wasn’t anything like the standard of video analysis that is available to teams now, but a fully switched-on England probably wouldn’t have found themselves trailing 35-3 before half-time.

Given what Dean went on to achieve as a coach, was there ever a period when he thought he may have been the right man to take on the England job? “I’ve never thought I’d be in the running,” he admits. “I thought I would offer a lot, from a consultancy point of view, working behind the scenes advising or whatever, but from my point of view, leading [the team], I wouldn’t be the right guy for the job. 

“You have to have the ability to form relationships with the media,” he continues. “And I’m not that man. You don’t have to deal with the agents, which is certainly a plus, and then it’s about creating a culture, and it’s fine, but you know, a big part of that job, probably 25-30 per cent of it is actually creating the image and a culture within the media. And that’s what I’m not good at. It’s just not me.”

That said, he was certainly uppermost in the thoughts of the RFU before Martin Johnson was made coach in 2008. “Mark Evans [at Harlequins] received a call from Rob Andrew and I immediately said I’m not interested.”

Instead, Johnson took the role, and although Dean was surprised that the man he made captain of Leicester took the job, he felt he should’ve stayed in it for longer instead of leaving after England’s underwhelming World Cup campaign in 2011. “Because he would have done his apprenticeship,” reckons Dean. “And you were going to get your best years out of him. His understanding of the game and his rapport with the players is right up there. He’s deadpan, but people know where they stand with him.

“Sometimes there’s a bit of luck involved in that as well,” he continues. “But we were the best team in the world in 2003, and I don’t think leading up to any of the subsequent World Cups we’ve been in that position.

“When you look at the England head coach, the aspirations are for that guy to take England on to win the World Cup, and anything less than that from a fan’s perspective, and a media point of view, is probably not enough. But there needs to be that understanding of what is being produced, have we got the right guys? And I think every year, you probably ask the twelve directors of rugby in the Premiership, and you probably get eight of them saying that we haven’t got the boys to do it and four who say we have.”

The career of Dean Richards is so extensive that it is hard not to jump around: aside from his police work, his rugby playing career drew to a close soon after the dawn of the professional era, the time at which his coaching career took off. The 1995 World Cup is widely viewed to be the tipping point for the game to turn professional, but six years earlier, in 1989, there was an incident during the Lions tour of Australia that was a portent of what was to follow.

This was the first time the Lions had played exclusively in Australia – in previous tours they would also go to New Zealand. Despite reservations in some quarters about that schedule, the tour proved to be a huge success and a turning point for the Lions, not least from a commercial perspective, and rugby’s suits saw an opportunity to cash in. “We were asked to go over to South Africa,” recalls Dean. “We’d just finished the third Test in Sydney and we still had the Anzacs Test coming up. John Kendall-Carpenter came into the room and said, ‘your tour is not over, you’re wanted to go over and play South Africa’.”

John was one of the founders of the Rugby World Cup, a former England player and president of the RFU. In 1989, apartheid was still being enforced in South Africa, albeit it was crumbling with President PW Botha on the verge of resigning. Even so, it was an odd decision at best. “He said, ‘you’ll go over there and, you know, there are issues with apartheid, but you’ll be shining a light.’”

Setting aside the obvious moral question, another question that arose from the players was, ‘well, what’s in it for us?’. Their ‘reward’ would be an allowance of £15 a day, plus a further allowance to make telephone calls. Meanwhile, they would have to ring up their bosses and tell them, ‘I’m not coming back to work for another couple of weeks’. And that’s before we even get into what touring South Africa in 1989 could have done for their reputations.

The players declined.

A few months later a World XV that included Philippe Sella, Franck Mesnel, Pierre Berbizier, Peter Winterbottom, Mike Teague, Rod McCall, Jeff Probyn and Tom Lawton played two Tests against South Africa. The team was coached by Willie John McBride. “I will maintain that rugby players should be allowed to play against whomever they please, without politics spoiling everything,” he said.

Dean says, “I think that tour was the advent of professionalism.”

“I had 35 contracts in a safe at home, from all the players from the Midlands franchise. I burnt every one of them.”

Then, in 1995 media mogul Kerry Packer put together a plan that was fronted by former Australian prop, Ross Turnbull for thirty franchises from around the world to be brought together and create a global competition under the name of the World Rugby Corporation. Hundreds of players secretly signed up, but it all fell apart during the summer of 1995 . “The players had adopted a ‘one out, all out’ approach and the South Africans pulled out,” recalls Dean. “We got down to the final hours before the South Africans said they wouldn’t sign. I had 35 contracts in a safe at home, from all the players from the Midlands franchise. I burnt every one of them. Yeah, interesting times!”

When the International Rugby Board declared the game ‘open’ and the RFU gave the green light to professionalism in England, everyone at Leicester was put on a £20,000-a-year contract. Dean played on until 1998, by which time he was no longer seeing eye to eye with Tigers coach Bob Dwyer. “I didn’t think I was gonna get another contract at Leicester,” he admits. “I’d been to Coventry and Moseley who were both Premiership clubs. Then the [Leicester] board called me in on a Sunday and said ‘we’ve done away with Bob’s services and we’d like you to take over as caretaker manager until the end of the year’. I didn’t have any sort of coaching philosophy in place.

“It’s quite difficult when you’re friends [with the other players] one day and then the next day you are thrust into a position whereby you’re in charge of their destiny. But I think the art of management is enabling somebody to feel special, yet in the eyes of somebody else you haven’t treated them any differently. 

“I had John Wells as my right-hand man and brought in Joel Stransky as the attack coach and we ran things between the three of us – the following year [1999], we won the league, then we won the league in the second year too.”

Stransky was offered a job at Bristol and left Leicester only for Bristol to renege on the deal, by which point Pat Howard had come in as backs coach. “The culture was already there before we took over, but it had been dampened down a little bit,” explains Dean. “It was a very sort of forward-dominated club. They just wanted to be known as the hardest side out there, who never took a backward step and you recruit around that.

“Any disciplinary stuff that happened you’d contest it purely because the boys wanted to contest everything. So, you found yourself thinking I reckon he’s guilty, but he’s saying he hasn’t punched the other player, so I’m gonna stand by my man.

“Every time you took to the field, you knew you had to fight to win the game and you had to be better than the opposition and for five years we were.” 

Dean says Leicester had the seventh-highest wage bill in the league during his time as coach, yet still won the league four times along with two European Champions Cups in 2001 and 2002 [then the Heineken Cup].

“Alexandre was sat down on a Swiss ball in the gym, smoking a cigarette, and saying, ‘I don’t need to do this, I played for France’.”

Dean’s squad boasted a group of players who were central to England’s World Cup success in 2003, and it brought with it a whole new mindset from the board at Leicester, keen to exploit the commercial opportunities of the nation being world champions. The players (and their agents) were suddenly presented with all sorts of new opportunities, or revenue streams, if you like. “I felt that the expectations were too high and that there was a lack of understanding that there was an investment needed to maintain that position at that time because heads have been turned and then money had to be spent,” says Dean. Instead, the club were left with an imbalanced squad, with a big age gap between the senior players and younger ones coming through.

By February 2004 the Tigers had failed to get out of the group stage of the Heineken Cup and were lying ninth in the Premiership table when Dean and Leicester brought a 23-year relationship to an end.

Then he surprised everyone, including himself it turns out, by taking a job at Grenoble.

The move from Leicester to Grenoble is almost akin to a lost album by a famous group or a movie made by a celebrated director that was never released. Everyone knows it happened, but not much else beyond that.

The plan was to quit rugby altogether. Dean and his wife were going to move to France and had enrolled their kids into a school near Carcassonne in the south. “We were going to start buying places, renovating them and then either renting them out or reselling them,” he explains. “Then I got a phone call from Justin Page, who is an agent and a friend. He said, ‘Grenoble are looking for a coach, are you interested?’ This was at the end of July [2004]. So I said, ‘well, I don’t know…’ but he said ‘Look, come up and see what you think’. 

“Well, when you drive in on the motorway you see the snow-capped mountains and the view is absolutely stunning,” he recalls. “And then they did a bit of a job on me and took me to a Michelin-rated restaurant. I was driving back down the motorway, my wife rang and asked what did I think? I spoke for twenty minutes without her saying a word and by the end she said, ‘we may as well pack our bags…’.

“As a place to live, and from a family and lifestyle perspective it was superb, but the club was dreadfully run and that started at the top with the president.” 

Dean, the best coach in European club rugby, found himself in charge of a team ranked among the favourites to be relegated from the French top flight. It is often said you learn just as much if not more from the periods in your life and career when things go wrong. In that respect, Grenoble was an education. “On my first day, I met the coaching team and I was introduced to the captain, a guy called Alexandre Chazelet. His opening gambit was, ‘so, you have to understand this, there’s a certain situation going on here’. I said, ‘What’s that?’, he said, ‘You’re English and I’m French, we won’t get on. My friend was the old coach and why they’ve brought in an Englishman I don’t know.’

“Within two or three days, I had a phone call from the conditioning coach to say, ‘can you come to the conditioning suite?’ Alexandre was sat down on a Swiss ball in the gym, smoking a cigarette, and saying, ‘I don’t need to do this, I played for France’. And then the other players are thinking, ‘well we don’t need to do this either’.

“[Alexandre] could have been a massive influence on the team and was a really good player as well. You know how you get somebody who understands the game really well, they’re not manufactured and he just had a natural flair for the game. And it’s just a shame that we couldn’t get him on board.

“But you see that so often over in France, that natural ability to play rugby,” he explains. “If you could combine that with the Anglo-Saxon way in which you get that little bit of rigour, that discipline, then you’ve almost got that perfect player. 

“It’s such a shame,” considers Dean, “because I think the northern hemisphere needs to have a World Cup winner. I think the Irish are good, but the Irish maximise everything they can get, whereas the French play to 70-75 per cent of their ability. Which is frightening in some ways and frustrating in others.”

Even though any sign of an entente cordiale between player and coach never materialised, Grenoble stood ninth in the table as the Top 16 went into its Christmas break. “The reason for coming back [to England] was the president of Grenoble,” recalls Dean. “We sat down and talked about Alexandre and agreed that we would let him go. God knows what he said to him!”

But the president, whose name was Alain Etiévent, wasn’t finished there. “We had an open plan office. He called me in and said, ‘just so you know I’ve sacked [the attack coach] Pierre Tremouille’.

“I said, ‘Oh, why have you done that? It would have been good to consult me’. He said it was a political decision and he’d appointed ‘Coco’ aka Frank Corrihons. I looked out into the office and Frank and Pierre were standing next to each other and I thought, ‘Pierre’s taking this very well.’

I said, ‘When did you tell Pierre?’. ‘I haven’t spoken to him yet’. ‘I take it you haven’t told Frank?’ ‘Oh no, I’ve told Frank’. 

“Your gut instinct says, ‘don’t do it’. And you still do it. A big mistake. then there was the cover-up, the reasons behind that which I’ll never go into with anybody.” 

“I walked out of the office. About an hour later I got a call from Pierre who was in tears. We went to have lunch together, he’s just a lovely guy and an incredibly gifted sportsman who could have been a motocross rider or a downhill skier. Instead, he became a rugby player and captained Toulon.

“After about five weeks, the president called me up and said, ‘I made a decision to get rid of Frank now’. I said, ‘well, it’s your decision’.

“We were travelling to Toulouse, I think it was on Friday. And the players heard about what had happened to Frank on the Thursday night. There was a strike on Friday.”

Dean rang up the president and said he needed to explain to the players what was going on, but the president wasn’t interested so the former number eight decided to go back to Blighty. 

Meanwhile, the players eventually got on the bus, went to Toulouse and got walloped by Les Rouges et Noir. “There was a meeting with the owners who apologised for what happened, but I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to leave at the end of the season’. Literally within a week of that Mark Evans [Harlequins CEO] had rung me and asked if I was interested in joining Quins.”

Dean arrived in south-west London after the team had been relegated from the Premiership to National Division One in 2005 and with a question mark hanging over whether he could achieve success anywhere other than Leicester.  “I had those questions as well,” he readily admits. 

“You have to tinker with how you deal with things. I’d come from a position at Leicester whereby the majority of the lads had come from state schools, to Quins where a majority of the boys came through the public school system. And they’re just a slightly different mentality, but they also had a looseness about them, which is great because it’s almost like the French way, but at the same time, you need that rigour and that discipline to actually achieve something.

“And so I brought in an Australian coach, Andy Friend, who I thought was outstanding,” explains Dean. “I was told by Mark that I wouldn’t be able to bring in an attack coach and he said we needed a winger. So, I did without the winger and brought in Andy.

“Mark didn’t like that at first,” admits Dean, “but then he understood my reasons and that the three of us complemented each other. We had sort of minimal facilities but we converted some squash courts down the road into a gym and did all the work ourselves.

 “It was a fantastic time and we gained a tightness in that group from that first year, travelling around and at every away game, having a night out afterwards,” he says of the season in England’s second tier. “It helped to see us through the following year.” 

Quins turned a promotion race into a procession, finishing the season with a record of 25 wins and one defeat (away to Exeter Chiefs). Before the start of the following campaign, Dean had warned Mark that Quins could lose their opening six games and needed to hold their nerve – they lost five in a row instead – but rallied to finish seventh.

In 2007-8 they edged up to sixth , then the 2008-9 season should have seen the completion of his renaissance as a coach, with the team finishing second in the regular season, and making the last eight in the Heineken Cup after finishing top of their pool. Instead, a visit to a joke shop in Clapham changed everything. Cheating or gamesmanship is part and parcel of sport at any level but ‘bloodgate’ added an extra level of theatricality, followed by the denials. “Your gut instinct says, ‘don’t do it’. And you still do it. A big mistake. And then there was the cover-up afterwards, and the reasons behind that which I’ll never go into with anybody. But you know, the reasons behind that shouldn’t have happened, as well as the fact it affected so many people.

“Whether it’s betting on games, whether it’s a systematic approach to breaching salary caps, or faking an injury to get somebody sent off, it happens, and people will push boundaries,” surmises Dean. “Ultimately, you have to pay the consequences and if there is a cover-up, then those consequences will be heightened. We shouldn’t have done it in the first place, even though probably seventy per cent of the clubs were doing much the same thing.”

The wink from Tom Williams as fake blood streamed from his mouth during the Heineken Cup quarter-final against Leinster, so that he could come off and be replaced by Nick Evans, was gift wrapped, couriered and delivered to the media. Rugby was front-page news. Somebody told Dean that that ‘bloodgate’ was treated as a bigger story by some papers in that week than the Lockerbie bomber being released from prison.

Dean was banned for three years, which at least allowed him to spend more time with his family, and watch his kids play rugby. 

When he returned, there was no lack of clubs looking to bring him back into the game. “I’d spoken to Bath and Worcester as well and actually, out of the three of them, I think Newcastle sort of seemed to be right. What mattered to me was that [the owner] Semore Kurdi had a passion for the game; he played and his son played and he was going to invest in the team.”

The club instantly won promotion and made steady progress up the Premiership table to finish fourth in 2018. Four years later, having been a coach for 22 of the previous 25 years, Dean needed a break and called time on his ten-year stint at the Falcons, who have since gone into freefall.

As we speak, Newcastle are in the process of finishing a league season without a single win to their name. Dean believes that’s a price worth paying if it means the club can operate on a sound financial basis. “You have to take your hat off to Newcastle in one way,” he says. “Ultimately, they’re doing something which will hopefully mean that the club will be around for thirty to forty years. So, you can understand what they’re doing and how they’re going about it.”

Dean hasn’t completely left rugby: he’s taken up a role as assistant coach at Tynedale RFC in National League Two North, a club that he has been connected to for some years through his kids playing there. “I still have ambitions to win titles,” he says, “but I enjoy the social side of the game, and the ability to interact with players is something you can do far more here than you can from a Premiership point of view.

“Tynedale don’t pay their players, and I’m not being paid, and that is what I believe in,” continues Dean. “I have a concern that there are a lot of ambitious clubs that don’t think long-term. For me, it is about providing something for the future of the game. If you spend it all on players, it is to the detriment of the rugby club.”

He’s also involved with the Players Platform which he described ‘as Tinder for rugby’ in an interview with The Telegraph. The platform involves matching players and coaches with other clubs around the world. Although he is keen to stress the project is very much his son’s brainchild, it has taken longer than planned to get off the ground because of the father’s lack of technical nous. The app hopes to maximise the wealth of talent out there working on the premise that, just because they didn’t succeed at one club, it doesn’t mean a player or coach can’t be successful elsewhere. 

“Nick Easter was one [player of this type], David Strettle and Danny Care were others, and Chris Harris as well, but you have to go looking for them,” he says. “Certainly, the academies are not teaching them life skills and it [failure at one club] is a massive blow to these kids who aspire to become the next star of the game, then who picks them up?”

The concept certainly seems solid enough, especially for the individuals involved. Dean Richards is still making an impact, it’s something he’s done his whole career, whether as a policeman, a number eight for Leicester and England, the man who built the first dominant force in English rugby of the professional era, the man who laid the foundations of the Quins side that would go on to win the Premiership title, or, perhaps even more remarkably, took Newcastle to fourth place. 

In club rugby terms, he’s made history. “Well, you want to make history don’t you,” he reflects. “And I have certainly made history – in a lot of ways.”

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by  Jamie Chung

This extract was taken from issue 26 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.