London Irish have been stumbling around the Premiership trapdoor for some time now and, barring something pretty unlikely, they are set to slip through it on Sunday after their match against Harlequins. With a seven-point gap to second-bottom Newcastle, and Wasps as their final-day opponents the following Saturday, any success against Quins is likely to merely delay rather than alter the Exiles’ fate.
Irish have been a fixture in the top flight since the 1996-97 season and a drop into the Championship will be hard to take. The TV cameras disappear, as do most of the crowds, and the newspapers no longer follow your progress with much interest. But it need not be all doom and gloom.
First of all, though, let’s dispel a myth: don’t believe it when people tell you the drop is a great opportunity to re-evaluate your business, give yourself a good shakedown and bounce straight back in rude health. People always quote the relegations of Quins in 2005 and Northampton in 2007 and tell you that both roared back and soon won the Premiership title. They forget, though, the two clubs were relegated in what was almost a different era and had strong and stable squads. They were relegated more in spite of what they were rather than because of it. This narrative also ignores the Bristol story, where a club who didn’t immediately bounce back have repeatedly failed to get back up through the play-offs.
What relegation does give is an opportunity to clear your mind and work out exactly what you want as a coach. Survival coaching, when you are battling the drop, is very different to strategic coaching. You’ve got the group you’ve got, you’ve got to win the game next week and the principles you started out with are not necessarily the ones that will achieve that.
The Premiership is so brutal that you can easily become sucked in, despite your intentions when you started out. Tom Coventry began his time at London Irish with principles based on his experience of Super Rugby but after being well beaten repeatedly he had to tweak his approach to the attritional nature of the Premiership and go chasing results. You have to compromise to get the result, and after doing that five or six times you can lose sight of what you believed in in the first place.
The first thing to deal with once you have had the chance to sit back and reflect after relegation is who you want playing for you. New signings are important but you need to prioritise who you want to fight to keep in the inevitable post-season recruitment shake-up.
The pressure is to get promotion at the first time of asking and the easy way to do that is to keep the players you have because they should be good enough to get you out of the Championship. But the reality is that if you keep too many they will simply keep you in the same cycle once you get back to the Premiership.
Equally, you need to avoid the temptation of buying a bunch of 33-year-olds purely because they have been there and done it. They may well get you back up but they may also take you straight back down.
Instead you need to create a core group who buy into your approach, to which you keep adding quality to help you move up the league. Rob Baxter has done this fantastically well at Exeter where young players such as Jack Nowell, Henry Slade and Luke Cowan‑Dickie have been steadily fed into the team and have been supplemented by astute and experienced signings such as Thomas Waldrom, Julian Salvi and Geoff Parling.
Baxter has developed a club from achieving promotion with a group of unknowns to building on that core group season by season, by adding quality without compromising on the original values. Very few names remain from the original promoted group within the current squad but that original group set out what it took to be an Exeter player and the current group are maintaining those values.
For all the planning and plotting a route out of the Championship, it is important to remember to enjoy yourself and to respect the clubs and the people who play in it. Many players’ first reaction will be that this is a tournament they don’t want to be in but with an eight-month season and some challenging environments it’s essential to retain a high dose of humility. If you don’t get stuck in and you play without engaging with your opposition and surroundings, you just set yourselves up as a target for everybody else to hit.
Losing away to a tactically astute Jersey backed by a passionate, packed crowd, followed by a few post‑match beers, is both a sobering and invigorating experience that reminds you why you got involved in this sport in the first place. The whole experience may seem a bit old school but too many of today’s professional players have bypassed that kind of experience. A couple of hours in the beer tent after a Pirates game will take them back to a bygone era – and it may even win them a few new friends and supporters.
