Peter Jackson: Pied Piper of Wasps leads them to new era

Dai Young and his ailing Wasps were bumping along on skid row three years ago, losing around £50,000-a-week and almost disappearing from the Premiership without trace.
Now that they are in the process of relocating lock, stock and barrel to Coventry, the famous old London club is buzzing as never before. Overnight their support has mushroomed from 5,000 to almost 30,000 which makes Young truly the Pied Piper of English rugby.
Their Welsh director of rugby responsible for the club’s salvation and subsequent renaissance under the backing of its multi-millionaire Irish owner, Derek Richardson, is in absolutely no doubt as to the finest achievement of his coaching career on either side of the Severn Bridge.
Young dismisses the obvious contenders. It wasn’t guiding the Cardiff Blues to their Amlin Cup victory over Jonny Wilkinson’s Toulon in Marseilles five years ago. Nor was it the Blues’ run the following season to the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup.
“Keeping Wasps in the Premiership at the end of my first season doesn’t sound much of an achievement except when you put it in the context of a suicide mission,” he said. “That’s what it felt like.
“Nobody mis-led me but had I known what was going to happen beforehand, I’d probably have turned the job down. The first two seasons were extremely difficult.
“I joined as director of rugby on the strength of the vision they had sold me – a new stadium project and increased investment. Six weeks into the job, the stadium project was turned down which meant that the owner walked away and we were in financial meltdown.
“It didn’t help that a lot of senior players had retired. We had no option but to throw a lot of kids into the first-team and, despite all the distractions, we made it by the skin of our teeth.”
They survived by one point, ironically the losing one they took from their last match of the season, at home to Newcastle.    That was enough to send the Falcons down instead and, in Young’s opinion, save Wasps from oblivion.
“Relegation would have been a very serious matter for the club,” he said. “Had we gone down, who knows if Wasps would still have been around today. I doubt very much whether they would.”
Young should know. The ‘distractions’ would have driven most sane coaches round the twist and yet, despite living with the constant fear of the club going bust, Young and Wasps avoided the trap door to the nether region of the Championship by one place, pushing Falcons down instead.
Four seasons on, they are flourishing, riding a wave of popularity greater than in the days of yore when they won four English and two European titles in six seasons.
In one respect, Young has worked a miracle. The club which used to play on a postage stamp of a ground in north London have found a new location in the west Midlands and a following they never came close to getting during their days at Loftus Road, never mind High Wycombe.
For their first match at the Ricoh Arena on the outskirts of Coventry, almost 30,000 turned up – six times more than the average number who used to file through the bottle neck of an industrial estate to Adams Park.
As Pied Pipers go, that puts Young in a Premier League of his own, not that he would dream of making such a claim.
And yet when more than 28,000 rolled up for their winning debut, no man can ever have felt more pride at being sent to Coventry than the 47-year-old former Lion.
“I’m not an emotional man,” he said, perhaps reflecting on the harsher realities of valleys life as he had known it in his native Aberdare. “The massive scale of the welcome, the thousands waving their Wasps flags that day brought a tear to my eye. It far exceeded our expectations.”
The same can be said of the team’s current standing, fourth with 46 tries. Only Northampton have scored more but Young, nothing if not pragmatic, volunteers the opinion that his players are “nowhere near consolidating” themselves in the play-off zone.
“The goal this year was to finish in the top six,” he said. “I thought we’d be in a shoot-out for that last place in the Champions’ Cup. We’ll keep pushing on but the reality is that we are not a top-four team yet. There’s a long way to go. I don’t think there’s much difference in the Premiership between fifth and ninth.”
He could, as revealed elsewhere in The Rugby Paper, have been an international coach preparing for the advent of the Six Nations. Instead Young declined Scotland‘s offer for four more years at Wasps.
“Now that we’re moving forward, on and off the field, I felt it was important to stay and see the job through,” he said. “I’m ambitious as a coach but there’s big job to be done here.”