'It's probably the biggest regret of my coaching career'

Former Newcastle Falcons and Harlequins head coach Dean Richards admits that the ‘Bloodgate’ scandal of 2009 is the biggest regret of his coaching career.

The scandal involving Quins and then director of rugby Richards shook rugby union and remains one of the Machiavellian chapters in the sport’s history.

The incident centred around a Heineken Cup quarter-final match against Leinster at the Stoop, where Harlequins wing Tom Williams was instructed to fake a blood injury using capsules to allow a kicker , Nick Evans, to come on and influence the game’s outcome.

The revelation of the deceit led to a wave of outrage from the rugby fraternity, and Richards was subsequently banned from the sport for three years, while Williams was given a four-month ban. The scandal’s fallout reached beyond just the individuals involved, with the credibility of rugby union and its values being called into question.

“You have a choice whether to do it or not and we as a team – and I – sanctioned it and allowed it to happen and was part of it,” Richards told Jim Hamilton on The Big Show podcast.

“I shouldn’t have done. As I said earlier on, your gut instinct is to say no and you should always follow your gut instinct in situations like that. It’s probably one of the biggest regrets of my career, well, probably THE biggest regret of my coaching career.

“That’s life. You’ve got to learn from it and I’ve learned a huge amount from it. You do have regrets but in my time out you learn to do other things and survive in a different way. So yeah, it was very different.”

‘Deano’ did pull up shy of going into explicit details around what happened, and explained why.

“I’m not going to go into it, only because it’s unfair on other people. If it was just me I wouldn’t have a problem but there were so many other people involved.”

“It was three years [the stand down period,” said the former England forward. “I spoke at a few dinners, did some introducing for an insurance company – Bollington’s – who very kindly took me on. I turned my hand to anything.

“It was fascinating. First of all, the furore surrounding Bloodgate. On the day that I got sentenced, the guy who had allegedly blown up the Lockerbie bomb was released from jail. I got the front page and the inside page of every daily and this guy was probably three or four. The significance of one versus the other… One’s a sporting thing versus people’s lives. It’s amazing. It goes to show what a sporting nation we still are I suppose, and its importance to us.”

Richards doesn’t believe the episode cost him the top job in the land, admitting he ‘was never going to get a look at England’ but says it certainly cost him at the Harlequins.

“It cost me opportunities maybe at Quins. We’d finished second that year and it took them a year to regroup. And they finished first two years after that. So there was lost opportunities at Quins plus the trauma that a lot of people went through that were there, for that following season.

“At the same time it probably made the boys a lot closer, which is a good thing, if you can have a good thing that comes out of it, or a positive.

“So for me it was a learning curve and you learn from it. Would I do it again? Definitely not.

“Your life changes direction all the time. You experience different things all the time. It’s very interesting that we are talking about certainties and things like that during my career. All through my career, you never had a certainty. Whether it be as a policeman when you knock at a door you don’t know who’s going to open the door. You go to an accident, is it a fatal accident? With all these things you don’t get a structure to your life.

“In rugby you never got that as well. Everything about the week was about the weekend but you were never guaranteed a win. And you had the emotions of the highs and the lows of victory versus a loss. So I never had that stable platform of going to work throughout the week and shutting up shop on Friday afternoon, cutting the lawns on a Saturday morning, washing the car on a Sunday and going back into the work on a Monday. It’s always been a roller coaster for me and I loved it and sort of thrived on it. That’s been my life.”

His three years away from the game started off in a slump until a meeting with an elderly neighbour put things in perspective. The man in his nineties told Richards of his exploits in World War II over a morning can of beer in Richard’s kitchen.

“He told me how he fought in the battle of Monte Casino and how he was captured by the Germans, escaped, and made his way back to the UK. It took him about an hour to tell his life story. Then he said: ‘So, tell me about your problems.’

“When you think about it and put it in perspective, my problems were no where near as bad as his.”