Former Premiership top try scorer Tom Varndell has been “sad” to witness Newcastle’s form at the start of the season and feels the league must urgently improve its governance to ensure the game is not wiped out in the North of England.
Despite new coach Alex Codling openly admitting that they would be playing this season on limited resources, the Falcons made a promising start to the campaign in the Premiership Cup as they won four of their five games and finished second in Pool B.
But a 60-7 defeat to Leicester Tigers in their penultimate match of that competition indicated ominous signs for the league season to come, and it proved to be the same venue where they suffered their eighth defeat from as many games in the Premiership recently as they were beaten 47-3 in a poor display at Welford Road.
“I was commentating on the Leicester vs Newcastle game recently,” Varndell said on the latest edition of The Rugby Paper Podcast. “It was just sad to watch them. It’s not a lack of effort, it’s the fact they just don’t have the weapons in terms of personnel and squad size to even compete at all in the Premiership.
“They’re probably in the game for 45-50 minutes every single week, and then that last half hour they just completely disintegrate, because they don’t have the strength in depth that all the other Premiership teams have.”
Following that defeat to Tigers, Falcons were only able to attract 3,802 supporters to their EPCR Challenge Cup opener against Montpellier, which was their lowest home attendance of the season at their 10,200 capacity ground Kingston Park, as poor defence saw them miss a golden opportunity to beat the side bottom of the French Top 14.
Although Varndell admits he doesn’t have the answers of how to solve that problem, he believes it is essential that changes are implemented for the most northerly team in the top flight to stop talent being drained from the club’s academy – such as George McGuigan, who left the club he started his career at for a second time as he moved to Gloucester midway through last season – and keep the game alive in the city.
“It is worrying because even when you go up to Newcastle and watch them their stadium’s not full. It’s still a horrible place to go to play if you’re an away team, but it’s not a great advertisement for the game itself when you see empty stadiums for a Premiership team.
“You need a team in the Premiership up in the North, because otherwise it becomes a midlands and southern competition, and the game doesn’t grow, so Newcastle need a lot of help to support and to grow it up there.
“They’ve have always produced some fantastic players like Jonny Wilkinson, Matthew Tait and Toby Flood, and they’ve still got a really good academy which is getting boys through, but then these players leave because obviously they can’t afford to keep them.
“Something has to happen, to lift it up there in some way. I don’t know what it is, I’m not a marketing expert, but it has to be more appealing and at the moment I don’t know how much investment or time is being put into it.”
During a Premiership career in which he scored 92 tries, most of which came at the now defunct Wasps, Varndell believes it is essential that another Premiership team is not lost after that club and two others – Worcester Warriors and London Irish – went into liquidation last season.
Suggesting other ways to improve the plight of teams that have struggled at the bottom end of the table, both in terms of playing and financial performance, he is dumfounded by the light touch approach that has seemingly been taken to governance of the league and feels it must change.
“What can’t happen is we can’t lose another top team,” he added. “That would be absolutely catastrophic. To lose the likes of Wasps and Worcester was just horrendous, but now Jersey have gone, London Irish have gone.
“In America, they have a draft system. We could have had it where if a team fails, or goes into administration, those players are then put into a draft and then put out to the weaker teams. It works [in the U.S.] because every year you don’t know who’s going to win, and that’s the way it should be.
“Not only have they let three teams go bust, which I still can’t believe happened, but then they’ve just allowed these players to go to the big clubs again like Saracens, Tigers and Bath.
“Bath have picked up Ollie Lawrence and he’s been outstanding, probably one of the best players in the Premiership, he should’ve been put up to Newcastle. Grow the game! They’re not doing it at the moment and it just blows my mind how they’ve allowed it to fail like it has.
“As for ringfencing, Ealing should’ve been promoted. They talk about their stadium not being big enough, who cares? Newcastle only get 3,000 people at their ground, Ealing have got the capacity for that.
“Now we have ten teams, or nine teams really that are competing with each other, who wants to watch that? It’s such a shame because there’s talent, there’s some great rugby out there, but the attendance numbers are dropping because people aren’t interested anymore.”
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