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

Nick Evans (2ndL) of Harlequins is brought back onto the field to replace the injured Tom Williams as referee Nigel Owens talks to Harlequins Coach Dean Richards (R) and Leinster officials during the Heineken Cup Quarter Final match between Harlequins and Leinster at the Stoop on April 12, 2009 in Twickenham, England. (Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

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

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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.

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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.”

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‘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.

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“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.”

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J
JW 47 minutes ago
'The Wallabies only have themselves to blame': How the Lions sunk Australia in Melbourne

Cameron Woki picked at the base of a ruck and jumped/dived over. That would clearly now be penalised.

But the Sheehan try is different to my eye. It starts from a tap penalty, he drives forward, the two WB defenders go low for a tackle in the assumption Sheehan will go to ground. He does not, but seeing the hole now left dives through it. In this case surely there is zero danger there.

World Rugby’s terminology/interpretation recently (shared again after this) is that it’s ok to hurdle/dive (that includes over, say a ruck, which we have seen this many times even in this years SR) to score a try, but it’s not (OK) to avoid a tackle. I can’t remember the one you describe (which may have been where their clarification came from) but that would sound OK. Sheehan definitely was playing the rope-a-dope and dived to avoid being tackled (can’t call it tackled really, just blocked/stopped lol), so shouldn’t have been awarded (I wasn’t aware of this last definition so just thought it was a very smart move). Was it premeditated? I’m not sure, but he could definitely have collected someones head if that was the case. And I guess even if he saw the space, I guess it’s not something they can allow as others might try it and get it terribly wrong?


Well summed up Miz. I have been thinking the whole situation of events that lead to this type of sneaky move is the problem, particularly as it relates to the difficulty and effort defenders now go to stop such situations (like say Slippers try), where players go extremely low to drive from meters out (and in most cases plays just trying to dive under). It’s also ugly business seeing attempt after attempt to go in under the tacklers, especially with them not really being able to perform a ‘tackle’ at all. I would simply give the defenders their goal line. All they need is some part of the body on or behind, and this will stop the play (being the fuel to this fire) from being attempted I reckon.

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