It is 80 miles from High Wycombe to Coventry and eight years since Wasps were last in the quarter-finals of the Heineken Cup. And if the journey from their old ground, Adams Park, to their new home at the Ricoh Arena seems a long one, the M40 is, at least, an easy road to travel compared with the one the club have been on since they last enjoyed any success in Europe, which has taken them perilously close to administration, relegation and bankruptcy. Not so long ago Wasps were around three minutes away from being wound up. They deposited a six-figure cheque to Her Majesty’s Revenue just in time to make the bank’s cut-off point for clearing. It was around then, too, that a lot of their players and staff went a month without being paid. The new owner, Derek Richardson, took over in April 2013 in the nick of time. Richardson has taken on much of the club’s debt and orchestrated their move to the Midlands.
This Sunday Wasps play Toulon away in the Champions Cup, the first time they have made it as far as this in Europe’s top competition since they won the Heineken Cup in 2007. Toulon, of course, have won the title for the past two seasons. “It’s a two-horse race,” says Wasps’ director of rugby, Dai Young. “But there’s not going to be much money riding on us.”
But then, as their captain, James Haskell, says, Wasps are used to being “a team that always have our backs against the wall”. Haskell takes heart from the fact that the club has been through so much. “We have always defied the odds. We defied the odds by staying up. We defied the odds by finding a new owner,” he says. “So I firmly believe we have got the ability to get a result in Toulon. If any team can do it, we can do it.”
Since their switch to the Ricoh just before Christmas Wasps’ form has improved dramatically. Before it their record for the season was played 15, won five, lost 10; they have since won seven and drawn two of 13. “The things around players’ security and finance have made a difference,” Haskell says. “They’ve taken some of the pressure off now that the only thing to focus on is the rugby.”
The crowds have helped too. “It has far outweighed what I expected,” Young says. “I was hoping that we could have got 8,000 average. That would have been fantastic, because we were averaging four or 5,000 at Adams Park.”
Instead Wasps have had at least 15,000 at the Ricoh for every game. Their last home match of the season, against Leicester, is a month away, and they have already sold 21,000 tickets for it. “The players,” Young says, “feel excited about playing in fantastic facilities and in a place we can call our home, because we’ve never been in that situation really.”
Wasps are still training in Acton, and will be for another year. That is accident, not design. But Young thinks it is for the best, because it has given the players and their families 18 months or so to look for houses and schools in Coventry. He has had time, too, to conduct contract talks with players before the move. “The discussions I’ve had have been hugely positive. I’ve not had one person who has said they don’t want to go to Coventry.”
With the new facilities, Young says, also come new responsibilities. “Because we’re playing at home, this is our patch, we’ve got the supporters coming out and getting right behind us, so we have got a responsibility to perform to the best of our ability to pay back the support we are getting in the area.”
The centre Elliot Daly says the players feel that they owe the new owner, Richardson, too. “He is one of those guys who would just do anything for the club and do anything for the people at the club. And that’s spurred us on to do well. We want to try and reward him for all his efforts.”
It is, Daly says, all “a far cry from where the team were two years ago.” Daly was one of the players who went unpaid back in the day. He was only 18 and still living at home, “so for me it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. But for the people with mortgages and school fees to pay, it was a big thing.” But still, it shaped him and some of the other younger players, like Joe Launchbury and Christian Wade.
“The younger guys who have come through the academy and who went through that time when we didn’t get paid, and we didn’t know what was going to happen, when we might have gone into administration, to go from there to here is such a major difference. That year gave the young guys at the club an experience of how bad it can be.”
Daly admits that the Toulon game will be the biggest he has ever played in. Young says that is the reason why, if he could have picked a fixture for his young team, it would have been this one at Toulon. “Win, lose or draw, the players are going to come away from there with a fantastic experience,” he explains. “These players will learn so much from it.”
Young says his side are still learning the game. Haskell has been passing on a lot of lessons: “I said to the boys: ‘At the end of the day we don’t want the highlight of the season to be that we moved to a new stadium and got big crowds.’ That’s irrelevant. I didn’t sign up to play rugby so I could play in a nice stadium and have big crowds. I want to win silverware.”
“We are very proud of our history and the tradition,” Young says. “But we have got a determined group who, while very respectful of that, want to start making their own mark. This is a great opportunity for us to start making our own mark, to get people talking about this current Wasps team.”
