“I’ve calmed down a lot,” laughs Steve Diamond, one of English rugby’s most renowned, experienced and sharp-tongued figures. “Bloody hell, 10, 15 years ago I was uncontrollable when it came to media and stuff like that.”
Though his forthright opinions remain unvarnished, Diamond has reinvented himself these past few years. At 55, he still sports the muscular physique of a front-rower, among the first tranche of players to be given contracts when the game turned professional. He still never shirks a challenge nor dodges a question. And he still arms himself with the knowledge and savvy garnered over three decades operating at the top of the English tree.
But no longer is his identity wedded so closely to Sale Sharks, the club he played for, coached, ran and for a time, held a stake in, over a vast swathe of his career. Diamond has become a coveted troubleshooter. Like Gordon Ramsay called in to ailing restaurants, the Mancunian is the go-to saviour for rugby folk in dire straits. He won the Premiership Cup with perennially battling Worcester before the club combusted in a haze of rancour. He was brought in to assess an underperforming Edinburgh, consulted Scottish Rugby and the RFU and now has ploughed his enthusiasm and know-how into transforming the toiling Newcastle Falcons.
“My mates in Manchester, who are all successful businessmen and sports fans, one of them said to me once, ‘oh you’re Sam Allardyce’,” Diamond says. “Am I f**k. Not that I’ve got any disrespect for Sam Allardyce. He is a football coach. I’m not.
“Behind the scenes at Worcester, we put it right very quickly. Edinburgh, people made the association because [former Scottish Rugby chief executive] Mark Dodson and I knew each other, he said ‘go up, tell me what needs to be done and give me an action plan’. I put it to the board and said, ‘this is what needs doing, there’s your problems’. Honestly, I would never have said get rid of Mike Blair as head coach. I told them Mike Blair [who announced his intention to step down before Diamond arrived] needed a senior guy to call on. I’m pissed off they didn’t finish in the URC play-offs last season.
“I’ve made myself defence coach at Newcastle. Defence is all about attitude. You don’t have to be skilful, you’ve got to be fit and have knowledge of what you’re trying to do. Northampton have implemented their defensive system, and it’s no different to what any other club would do, there are little nuances in it.
“I am used to getting the balance sheets ready for the board, the commercial stuff – I’ve now got nothing to do. So why do I want to be sat with my feet on the desk? I’m going to retrain as a defensive coach. Part of it shows me the future job for Steve Diamond will be, ‘hey lads, this is what I did – I owned a third of Sale, sold it, went to Worcester and did this, went to Scotland under the SRU, then a job at the RFU.’ I’m trying to build a track record of, in a small amount of time you can change the whole psyche of these places.”
When England made the Euros football final I gave them the morning after the game off, told them to go and have a few pints.
Diamond fetched up in Newcastle eight months ago. The Falcons were limping along, spirited but callow, a squad ill-equipped to handle the demands of Premiership rugby and a head coach, Alex Codling, exasperated by the constraints he felt placed upon him.
Unwilling to chase fools’ gold and suffer the same desperate fate as several English giants, Newcastle owner Semore Kurdi has cut his cloth. The hope is, the club harnesses its substantial local talent and builds a prosperous long-term future. In the here and now, results have been bleak and the budgetary gulf telling.
Since reaching the Premiership semi-finals in 2018, the Falcons were relegated the following season, promoted a year later, then finished 10th of out 12 teams in 2021, 12th out of 13 in 2022, 11th out of 11 in 2023, and brutally, 10th out of 10 last term without winning a match. They last claimed a league victory in March 2023.
“I got rid of 17 players and only two have got jobs in the Premiership. That reducing the squad was the right thing to do,” Diamond says.
“The real history of it, which I haven’t gone through with the lads because I don’t want to wound them any more, is it’s systemic. They’ve been at or near the bottom of the league for the past three or four years.
“I sound like I’m the oracle, I’ve just done it with clubs who haven’t had a lot of money three or four times. When I came in, I was observing and trying to rescue something. Now it’s down to me. Not that I’ve changed the banter in any way. Everybody has to eat together. It’s not a prison camp. When England made the Euros football final I gave them the morning after the game off, told them to go and have a few pints. I know how to get the best out of a poor team. It’s all about the buy-in.
“I get more pleasure out of seeing John Stokoe, the team manager – I’ve promoted him to operations manager, he’s brilliant at what he does. [Forwards coach] Micky Ward – Al Sanderson said to me, ‘Dimes, if you’re ever getting rid of Micky Ward let me know and I’ll take him on at Sale tomorrow’. They are great people. What’s the old adage about the mortar between the bricks? They hold it all together. Not Steve Diamond, they do.”
Most concerningly, Newcastle have failed to retain several of the youngsters who are supposed to underpin their new blueprint. Though Ben Redshaw is a searing talent, Guy Pepper, Louie Johnson and Phil Brantingham had all agreed terms with rival clubs before Diamond arrived. Newcastle have a large and fertile catchment area, but if they cannot match their opponents for salary, and cannot keep their top prospects for more than a season, the strategy will falter.
“The people who make decisions at the top are very successful businessmen,” Diamond goes on. “Because it’s an open wound and it’s haemorrhaging cash, they don’t realise if you lose a Guy Pepper who earns a lower wage, it costs you literally three or four times more to replace him with a player who is not as good. It’s a false economy.
“I got there and the players had made their decisions. I told them they’d be considered for selection as long as they’re here and said, ‘one day you might come back’. That sets the tone. I didn’t get personal with them.”
With Diamond, a spade is always a spade. His apparently blunt approach has fuelled false perceptions about his character and the emotional depth of his leadership. Detractors see a domineering, one-dimensional bulldog; a relic of the old school.
“Yeah, 100%,” he says, when asked if this is how some still choose to view him. “The old adage of judging the book by the cover. By the RFU and SRU taking me on, I’ve dispelled that image a little bit. Josh Beaumont is Bill’s son, the head of World Rugby, and he’d signed for four years at Sale. Faf de Klerk had signed for three years. If I was such an ogre, how would the Sale staff work for me for eight-nine years? Why would these players?
“The reason I am really happy after leaving Sale and getting those jobs and helping turn those places for the better – not completely around but for the better – was the very fact a lot of people don’t like the old-school mentality. Old school to me means the way we used to do things was correct, it’s just a bit quicker and more politically correct now.”
I said to the maintenance lads in the stadium, ‘go to this website, you’ll buy a sink, a cabinet, a tap and a waste for £200’. How do you know that, Dimes? How? I’ve built 12 houses in my life.
This is where Diamond comes into his own; an adroit operator, at ease with who he is and where he has been. His roots are steeped in working-class graft. His father worked in a printing shop and when he passed away, the union job was held for 15-year-old Diamond. He would showcase an early entrepreneurial streak, later running his own printing and construction businesses and building his family a beautiful home in Cheshire.
There are traits his upbringing demanded; the same traits he instils in the kids emerging from the Newcastle pipeline, all of whom have agreed long-term contracts, unlike Pepper, Johnson and Brantingham. When they come of age, the club holds the option to activate a competitive senior deal or let them go.
“Up until then, at the end of every training session, those lads have to put all the kit away, they go to the gym and clean all the apparatus, then they get their meals and bugger off back to their accommodation,” Diamond explains. “That’s what I call old-school values. Respecting the area.
“Before I was a printer, I was a sweeper of the floor of the print shop. Unless you get people like me who do this, these lads would never know that’s what you had to do. I remember people saying ‘the All Blacks always sweep the changing rooms’. It’s just values.
“We’ve just redone the offices so everyone fits in the same office, and we needed a sink and whatnot. I said to the maintenance lads in the stadium, ‘go to this website, you’ll buy a sink, a cabinet, a tap and a waste for £200’. How do you know that, Dimes? How? I’ve built 12 houses in my life. I know how to do things. That’s the bit they like, and the bit I like. Because it’s not all rugby, rugby, rugby.
“I’ve learned from some of the best and some of the worst. I had a coach once who used to make us do a 4km run after training. I thought, this guy is killing us, if I ever become a coach I’m never gonna do this. Now the sessions are so thought-out and so sharp in every environment, the players love coming in. It isn’t a job. It’s fun.”
To further embed this ethos, Diamond has gone to the market. Recently, he hired long-time confidant Alan Dickens to his coaching staff. Dickens has an impressive CV with Northampton, Leicester and the England Under-20s. He has signed eight battle-ready recruits too. ‘Hard lads’, as he puts it. Most, products of the Diamond School of Snarl in Salford.
Cam Neild is a workhorse whose opportunities at Sale were limited by the Curry twins. Connor Doherty and Sammy Arnold will inject much-needed go-forward in midfield. Tommy Gordon, the former Glasgow Warrior, is a brilliant replacement for Pepper, all fire and brimstone on the open-side flank.
“They’re the lads these young kids learn off. That no-nonsense approach of ‘listen, this is what we do’. A lot of it is creating – and I’m sick of people talking about it because it’s actually common sense – the right culture.
“We’ve already seen it in training, we’ve said, ‘look at these lads doing extra running’ – not after the event but in games, scrambling to tackle even though it’s only a touch session on a Wednesday afternoon. That’s what the ex-Sale lads bring. You know getting kids out of that environment is good. It’s going all right, but equally it’s always going all right when there’s no pressure.”
Those inside the Falcons camp feel the malaise has lifted. Kingston Park was once the scourge of away teams and their most illustrious players, who feared the long journey, the biting gusts and the ferocity of their hosts. The group emptied themselves in fruitless pursuit of victory last season but reinforced and revitalised, they feel ready to claim scalps once again.
Excited for the North@falconsrugby pic.twitter.com/qJN1Q3berC
— Steve Diamond (@Steve_Dimes) January 19, 2024
“The spirit in them, if I can get a 20% increase out of them and win some of my home games, there’ll be no stopping this squad,” Diamond says.
“Potentially, this is my biggest job. I told the lads recently, ‘we are the dirty dozen’. When the fixtures came out, all those other teams will be going ‘win-win’ against us – trust me. It’s our job to get ‘win-loss, win-loss, win-loss’ against six of them. That’s the exciting bit of it. That’s how I get enthused.”
Newcastle raise the curtain on a new Premiership season when Bristol visit Tyneside on a Friday night next month. They do so once more as underdogs, but through his sheer strength of personality and all the tools gathered over so many years, Diamond believes fervently they can be competitive now, and a force in future.
“The long-term goal is to become a respected team again in the Premiership, get into the Champions Cup, and in three or four years, hand the job over to people whose life and soul is Newcastle. It’s a bit like Sale, Newcastle. It’s parochial, it needs people who understand the region to be there. I am a little bit of a foreigner but I’m close enough in the north to not be considered that and we have a good rapport.
“If we get it right, not always on the field because everybody has to be a loser one week, I will definitely leave Newcastle in an unbelievable position compared to when I went.”
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