Leeds

Sunday 2nd September, 2001.  The SkyRack was bouncing. Phil Davies was bouncing, dual-international Steve Bachop was bouncing, young Tom Palmer was bouncing, the whole place was bouncing… this was a night like no other for professional rugby union in the city of Leeds. Once-mighty Bath had been beaten, 10-6, by the upstarts from Headingley and the city was in celebration mode. There’s only one way rugby in Yorkshire is going from here…

Nearly twenty years on from that win on Leeds’ Premiership debut, professional rugby union in the northern city is almost as invisible as the deadly virus that has temporarily forced the closure of the SkyRack – a local institution – and the countless other nearby hostelries, and also put an end to a season in which Leeds, as they are known again after a five-year period as Yorkshire Carnegie, finished rock bottom.

After a season of 50-point plus beatings, Carnegie have now departed both the Championship and Headingley. Demotion to National One, the third tier of English rugby means no central funding and no hope of paying the £100,000-a-year rent required to play at the world-renowned multi-sport arena. 

Reports suggest their new home ground will be a couple of miles up the hill at Weetwood university playing fields. As Otley Road journeys go, it’s as big a comedown as the time Danny Cipriani got run over by a bus while negotiating the famous stretch of pubs on a Sale Sharks night out, although England U18s swear by the quality of the main pitch there.

Worst still, in the last few years, Carnegie have become as unloved to outsiders as the Leeds United team of the ‘70s. Davies’ shock return to the club, midway through last season, is as much about repairing the damage done off the pitch by the mismanagement of the disastrous Jon Wright/Dave Dockray regime, as reviving fortunes on it. In a season when it was one bad news story after another, the popular Welshman’s decision in January to come back to the club where he made his name, to help it ‘in its hour of need’, was one positive and welcomed by everyone connected to the club.

None are more connected than current Leinster coach Stuart Lancaster, the former Leeds Tykes player and academy manager whose son Daniel’s performances in the first team’s midfield last season were a rare beacon of hope amid the gloom around him. “A lot of ex-players I speak to, speak with tremendous affection for their time at the club, and Phil was a huge part of that,” the former England head coach tells Rugby Journal.  “Knowing the city and the club as he does, there is no better man in my opinion to get the team back on track both on and off the field.”

Much of the hostility towards Carnegie came about at first because of the decision to ditch the name Leeds and replace it with Yorkshire in 2014. The brainchild of Sir Ian McGeechan, the idea had its merits, and CEO Gary Hetherington called it ‘the last roll of the dice for professional rugby union’ in the white rose county. But it was mistimed. Rotherham, who’d been in the Premiership themselves, and Doncaster Knights, were both above Carnegie in the Championship table at the time and it just smacked of arrogance. Instead of pulling the disparate parts of Yorkshire together in the pursuit of one common goal – Premiership rugby – it only served to highlight historical parochialisms. 

Worse was to follow from a popularity point of view. The RFU’s decision not to deduct them any points when the club entered into a Company Voluntary Arrangement last June stuck in the craw of many in the game, notably Richmond who missed out on a place in the Championship as a result of Carnegie parachuting in Kiwi players they couldn’t afford to pay, to pull themselves clear of relegation danger. 

Rightly, Richmond accused the game’s governing body of double-standards, as they had been sent packing down the league ladder after going bust in the late ‘90s before working their way back up adopting a much more prudent financial approach.

The suspicion was that Carnegie were given preferential treatment for geographical reasons, in acknowledgement of Yorkshire’s position as a key strategic stronghold in the English game. The county that has provided more England internationals than any other, so the argument goes, deserves a top-flight club to be proud of which is why Davies and others continue to fight the good fight when all about them think, ‘why bother?’.

Had Davies and others held that defeatist attitude two decades ago, great days like the Bath victory in the Premiership and the 2005 Powergen Cup Final win against the same opponents, would never have happened, and Yorkshire rugby, and English rugby, would have been all the poorer for it – as well as the local pubs. For many years, Leeds’ academy punched above its weight, a conveyor belt of talent – with the likes of future England internationals Danny Care, Luther Burrell and Tom Palmer rolling off it – sadly benefiting other, more fashionable, Premiership teams for the most part.

Hostility is not a new phenomenon to a club that liked to belt out ‘marching on together’ in the good times, and used to rally around each other in the bad. The spirit of togetherness Leeds once had as a squad was unique, “we were a star team not a team of stars,” Argentinian winger Diego Albanese likes to say when asked to reflect on his time at the club, from 2002-05, the club’s ‘golden era’.

With that first Bath victory in 2001, a club that had been in the old Division Four when Davies came on board as DoR in 1996 – four years after Headingley and Roundhay had merged to become one – had proved they were worthy of their place in English rugby’s elite.  “What a start! We’d been in pre-season for about five years and were absolutely firing,” recalls Dan Scarbrough, a close-season recruit from Wakefield, who went on to play for Saracens and England. “We’d worked hard, doing the hills (at Roundhay Park), and doing all sorts of army camps. Bath had travelled a fair distance and probably didn’t expect to be met with what they were met with. Our general ethos back then was ‘we might not have the skills that everyone else has got but we’ll be fitter, stronger and we’ll have more passion’, and it worked that day. It was great.”

A crowd of 5,181 turned out to watch, many simply out of curiosity, the start of a rollercoaster journey which has had more stomach-churning lows than exhilarating highs. While that figure wasn’t far short of some of the attendances of more established clubs on the opening weekend of the season – and more than Bristol managed for their home game against Sale – no-one was kidding themselves that this was going to be easy: neither  an easy sell to the local public, who either revered football or rugby league, and in some cases reviled rugby union, nor  an easy ride on the pitch. Over the next two decades, those fears would be borne out as the club – even in its sweet, but all too rare, moments of success – would struggle to shake-off its imposter syndrome. 

Maybe they were in the wrong place? The aforementioned Palmer thinks so. “We never really got the public support that we needed,” he says. “(Owner) Paul Caddick was putting in money every year but we didn’t get bigger crowds, or more sponsors.

“At the time, I was enthusiastic for the project, and thought it would work, maybe I was naïve, because now I’ve got 20-plus years of professional rugby experience behind me, I think a bit differently.

“Leeds probably wasn’t the right place for this project. If right at the start, when Caddick took over, he’d spoken to Harrogate Council, and they’d been behind it and let him build a stadium, then maybe we could have had a good go at it.”

A clue as to how hard it would be to build a fanbase came the week before the Bath win. The indifference that accompanied Leeds in the years prior to promotion, as they battled with the likes of Worcester and Rotherham to get into the Premiership, turned into a more hostile response from natives used to watching thirteen men not fifteen, as Leeds took on Llanelli, Davies’ former club, in their only home pre-season friendly. 

“That was my first game having joined the club from Wakefield for the first season in the Premiership,” says Scarbrough, who scored twice on debut. “We were the warm-up match for the Rhinos (RL), it was a double header, but the ‘Leaguies’ sat outside the ground in protest while our game went on, or the ones that came into the ground had banners up in the stand saying, ‘Get off our Pitch’ or ‘100% League, 0% Union.” 

For all the antipathy, over the years, Leeds’ board have tried to make the two codes co-exist in harmony. Maybe that was a mistake too, given the cultural differences. They say you cannot put a square peg in a round hole, and fifteen into thirteen doesn’t go. It’s a model that has never worked, either way around, as one of the shrewdest of operators, Mark Evans, discovered at Harlequins.

While any initial mistrust was replaced by mutual respect from a Leeds Rugby operations’ point of view, as the two organisations, league and union, worked side by side at the Kirkstall training base, not enough supporters bridged the divide to make the Tykes a proper going concern. 

Yes, 14,000 attended the Newcastle fixture shortly after England had won the World Cup in 2003, but once ‘Jonny-mania’ subsided, in all their years in the Premiership – and there were eight of them combined – Leeds managed just one more five-figure home attendance (12,015), against Gloucester on New Year’s Day in 2011. That was another league-union doubleheader and the crowd included a large contingent of travelling Gloucester fans, a small band of rugby league fans prepared to give ‘kick and clap’ another go, plus those simply glad for an excuse to get out the house early after the excesses of Christmas. 

The connection with league seemed sensible in principle, like the club’s ill-fated decision to change its name, as a pooling of resources would surely only make the two entities stronger, but in certain respects it was a handicap. Recruitment was definitely one of those areas. Gary Hetherington, who never needed a second invitation to remind people he was the longest-serving CEO in professional rugby union, is a league man through and through, and always will be. 

When it came to striking deals with players, Hetherington could never understand how a second-choice scrum-half in union could command a similar wage to a league top-earner. This led to missed opportunities, notably at the end of the 2009/10 season when Leeds defied all predictions to stay up under the coaching of Neil Back and Andy Key. Key was even named director of rugby of the Year at the Premiership awards as a reward for the club finishing 10th, not last, as everyone predicted. Instead, it was Worcester who were the fall guys that year.

The late Seru Rabeni was crucial to Leeds staying up. While head of S&C Steve Nance was whipping the team into shape, a more laissez-faire approach was applied to the former Leicester man who needed nursing through the season because of an existing leg injury. The Fijian repaid them for the TLC treatment with a string of blockbuster performances. 

“Seru, god bless him, was the biggest threat to any team we played, they hated playing against him,” says Key.  “We wanted to build the team around him, and Backy and I still feel the biggest issue was we didn’t re-sign him.

“He came back to us after La Rochelle had made him an offer and said if we could match what they were offering, he’d stay.

“We went to the board and they said, ‘we don’t spend that sort of money’. We turned around and said ‘that’s the difference between rugby union and rugby league.’

“Backy and I still feel, if we kept him, one or two other players might have come, and had they come, then who knows what would have happened.

“I was talking to world-class nines and tens, we were talking to (Peter) Stringer, we were talking to (Shaun) Berne, the Australian at Bath.”

“We were sold something that was not delivered. We were given a particular story and we believed that the finances would be there, but when it came to it, they weren’t. You have to question, has the finance ever really been there to compete at the highest level?”

To be fair to the Leeds board, the one time they did open up the cheque book, in the wake of the Powergen Cup win, it back-fired on them badly. All Blacks superstar Justin Marshall didn’t want to march on together up the Roundhay Hills, preferring to do things his way. Gritted teeth had replaced Yorkshire grit as frustration grew. The team lost its way and ultimately lost its place in the Premiership in 2006, bringing an end to Davies’ ten-year reign at the club.

They got back up twice more, under Key and Back and then Lancaster, and also reached the Championship final against London Irish in 2017, but nearly a decade has passed since their last top-flight campaign, and the once-prized academy is now in the RFU’s hands. 

Missing Rabeni and a number of other star turns, who’d been sold to higher bidders, Leeds still had a lifeline as they headed down to Franklin’s Gardens on the final day of the 2010/11 season as relegation rivals Newcastle could still be caught.

Leading 24-3, Leeds looked good for the win, but Saints came storming back to score 28 unanswered points. Even so, a fourth try would have been enough for Leeds but while Saints could bring on millions of pounds’ worth of talent, Back – now on his own after the sacking of Key in February – had to turn to the likes of university trialist, Uche Odouza. Odouza was very nearly an instant hero when he reached for the corner in the last play of the game, but the home defence got enough numbers across to bundle him into touch, and that was that. No more Premiership rugby.

While the lack of strength in depth of Leeds’ bench cost them when they needed it most, no-one can question the financial commitment of the then-owner Caddick, the construction magnate who laid the foundations for Leeds’ rise through the leagues. His pockets simply were not as deep as those he was contending with. Combined with the inequitable ‘P’ share arrangement that saw Leeds get less central funding than the others, Caddick decided it was time to stop throwing good money after bad in 2017, selling the club to a consortium headed up by fellow ex-Headingley player, Wright. 

“It is almost impossible for anybody but a multi, multi-millionaire who is playing with his pocket money to compete with them,” claims Caddick, in reference to the Premiership’s main sugar-daddies.  “The structure was designed that way to protect the founder clubs. It is very difficult to join the party when the people in the party don’t want you.

“It was all based on Tom Walkinshaw’s Formula 1 meritocracy concept, where basically the bigger clubs get bigger and the small get the crumbs at the bottom of the table. 

“The day we joined the Premiership, they cut our money in half. Had that not happened, we’d have been able to attack the other teams with a lot more ammunition in our belt.

“I remember suggesting we play only with thirteen players at a Premier Rugby board meeting seeing as we’re only being paid half of the central funding, it was that unfair.

“We had no chance in reality of recovering from it. The structure of Premier Rugby and the so-called ‘founder’ members have really excluded every other club in England from participating.”

The sale of the club’s P shares to Exeter for £5million in 2012, to raise much-needed funds, meant that the gap between themselves and the rest was only going to get wider and wider. 

A period of austerity followed, and it became clear that getting back into the Premiership would be an uphill battle, one which Caddick decided to step away from three years ago.

Wright, unfortunately, was the wrong choice, not that many more were knocking at the creaking door with wads of cash. With the Carnegie (university) sponsorship deal coming to an end at the conclusion of their first season as the club’s custodians, a £1 million-a-year hole in the budget needed to be filled. Wright’s Exercise for Less gym business made up some of the shortfall but, for reasons that remain unknown, he suddenly jumped off the financial treadmill and disappeared without trace last Christmas, shortly after agreeing to sign the Kiwi cavalry on 18-month deals. That decision, and his withdrawal of funding, effectively signalled the club’s death-knell.

So few supporters were left by the time last season finished with Yorkshire rooted to the bottom of the Championship, the league diehards will barely notice their unwanted tenants have gone. But while Leeds may be unloved to those in and outside of the city’s boundary, Davies is looking to build bridges and draw on the city’s university sporting heritage.

“We’ve got about 25 players who are interested in a rebuild – a lot of them are students who are staying in Leeds in and around the Leeds area which is important,” says Davies. 

“We need players that live within half an hour of the training ground. Last year we had some players who put amazing commitment in but some of them were an hour and a half, two hours away from the training ground which is tough when you’re working full time and then training three times a week like we were doing in the end. 

“We’ve got a basis of what it’s going to look like for us and a group of players that are interested in helping with the rebuild but there are so many variables and unknowns at the moment, all we can do is try and put a car on the start line and try and drive it in a direction when we know what the funding is etc. etc.”

Davies has also been busy putting together a former players network, hoping that the strong bond that still exists between those involved in the glory years will help them on the long road back from near-oblivion. 

“We’ve got to get behind someone, everyone is fighting their own corners … Leeds, Doncaster and Rotherham,” says Scarbrough, who is now in charge of rugby at nearby Bradford Grammar. “There has to be a place where players can go otherwise the best talent in the county  will be lost to other clubs.”

That has been Leeds’ age-old problem, and one that will remain so until the time a passionate Yorkshireman raises enough cash. Captain Tom to the rescue? 

Story by Jon Newcombe

Pictures by John Ashton and Dave Williams

This extract was taken from issue 10 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.