Nick Cain: Good luck ‘Coventry Wasps’, the great club I joined is dead

This was the week when Wasps supporters and former players said farewell to their club. The London and home-counties based Wasps of the last 147 years are gone – sent to Coventry – amid a welter of positive spin from their current administrators about purchasing a 50 percent interest in the Ricoh Stadium, and bitter recrimination from a fan base which, while relatively small, was among the most staunch in the Premiership.
Wasps supporters were left to reflect on how deeply ironic it is that while Stuart Lancaster is lauded for his attempt to reconnect England with their heritage, claiming that a sense of unity and identity is essential to team-building, Wasps have distanced themselves from their own illustrious past.
Their supporters’ anger at being virtually ignored throughout the negotiations to up-root the club and relocate it in the Midlands is justifiable, especially as there was an unacceptable element of the clandestine about it which cannot be excused on the grounds of ‘confidentiality’.
Furthermore, whatever obfuscation Mark McCafferty and his mates at Premiership Rugby and the PGB cook-up, the plain fact is that we have entered the age of club franchises, with Wasps having the dubious honour of being the first of them.
The Wasps relocation sets a precedent. It follows the model familiar to those in American pro sport when a club, or franchise, which loses money in their original geographical heartland are often sold and ripped from the heart of one community to be transplanted in another, often hundreds of miles away. The Baltimore Colts move to Indianapolis (1984), and the Los Angeles Rams to St. Louis (1995) are cases in point in American Football.
The move to the Ricoh Stadium in Coventry has, in once fell swoop, severed the links that Wasps had with the rugby communities of North London and the arc of counties stretching from Berkshire and Bucks in the west to Hertfordshire, Essex, and as far as Cambridgeshire and Suffolk in the east.
When I joined Wasps as a player in 1984 that was the catchment area the club drew from for players, with the seconds, thirds and fourths playing against junior clubs throughout that area, as well as the big London clubs. However, Wasps had traditionally opened their doors to itinerants from all over, and there were contingents from the north, the West Country and a liberal sprinkling of Kiwis, Aussies, Welsh, Scots and Irish. It meant that training at Sudbury always had a vibrant melting-pot quality to it.
By the time the game went pro in 1995 they were a growing force in the English game, and then, in the professional era, Wasps took off thanks to a group of players who were as highly talented as they were motivated, led by Lawrence Dallaglio and coached by Warren Gatland and Shaun Edwards.
That group – many of them homegrown having been spotted by former coach Rob Smith and brought through the club’s academy – ushered in a golden era in which Wasps supplanted Leicester as England’s leading club, winning two Heineken Cups and four Premiership titles (to add to the two they won in 1990 and 1997).
However, the feats of Dallaglio, Joe Worsley, Simon Shaw, Alex King, Fraser Waters and Josh Lewsey on the field were never matched in terms of an administrative vision for the future, with chief investors like Chris Wright and Steve Hayes – who relocated the club to Adams Park, the home of his football club, Wycombe Wanderers – unable to implement a plan for Wasps to have their own stadium. Hayes, it should be said, pursued a grand design at Booker Air Park for a number of years until Bucks County Council pulled their support.
The upshot is that Wasps have left the London stage to their arch-rivals Harlequins, and the club that for so long lived in their shadow, Saracens. While neither outfit has succeeded in matching Wasps achievements on the field in the pro era, they both succeeded in developing successful grounds, and Quins a sustainable business model, where Wasps failed.
The roots of that failure were sown at the start of the pro era when the club sold their Sudbury ground for barely more than £1m to Loftus Road plc, in which Wright was a main shareholder. It was a gross undervaluation, highlighted when Loftus Road plc sold the ground to a housing developer for almost £12m.
The Wasps FC amateur club were later awarded more than £5m in damages after taking the valuers to court, leaving them with about £2m after costs, which they then used to purchase their present Twyford Avenue ground from Wright.
The lasting legacy of that tortuous labyrinth of wheeler-dealing is that the club, despite being the Kings of Europe in 2004 and 2007, and being based either in or near London, one of the world’s largest, richest and most vibrant conurbations, have self-evicted.
It leaves Quins and Sarries as the only Premiership clubs in a city with a population of almost eight million people, while Wasps have relocated to a city of 330,000 souls which is a mere 25 miles from Welford Road and 30 miles from Franklin’s Gardens.
The battle for the hearts and minds of Wasps core supporters over a move to Coventry was one that the new owner, Derek Richardson, and his chief executive, Nick Eastwood, were destined to lose. A 160 to 200 mile round trip at the weekend on Britain’s crammed and creaking road and rail systems saw to that.
However, they did not endear themselves to their own fans by refusing to outline their future plans, and by refusing to conduct interviews with the media. Marginalising their supporters has been far more damaging than it need have been, leading to rumours that Richardson’s purchase of a 50 percent share in the Ricoh was as much about property speculation as securing a solvent future for Wasps.
Eastwood rejected this angrily when I spoke to him. “That is complete rubbish. Any additional land at the Ricoh is only for ancillary facilities for the stadium or conferencing. This acquisition is about Wasps being a self-sustainable business which can succeed and grow without being reliant on a single individual – and it is about the Ricoh providing us with significant non-match day revenues.”
Eastwood also said that Brentford’s soon to be vacated 12,300 Griffin Park stadium failed to measure up to the self-sustainability criteria.
According to sources at the club, Richardson, an Irish businessman who made £30m from the sale of part of his online insurance interests in 2010, is an affable, generous character. He is also an ardent rugby fan with former affiliations to Munster and Leinster, who is steeped in the game, and attends virtually every Wasps match with his wife and family, who are also keen rugby supporters.
Richardson said last year that his interest in Wasps stems from his great admiration for what they have achieved. Now, having cut the cord which linked Wasps with almost 150 years of rugby history in and around London, he faces the monumental task of building a new Wasps dynasty in Coventry.
Attracting supporters, and keeping star players like Joe Launchbury and Christian Wade, will depend ultimately on how good the Coventry Wasps are on the field, and in terms of their engagement with the local community. It will take time, and whether Richardson’s men have that luxury will be dependent on the success of non-rugby conferencing and concert facilities to provide the funding to make them Premiership pace-setters.
I wish the Coventry cousins luck, and hope the venture succeeds despite a deep dislike of the franchise precedent it sets. As for the club I knew, here’s hoping that Wasps FC do a Richmond and start the long march from London North West 3 to National 1 – and maybe beyond!
*This article was first published in The Rugby Paper on October 12