Wasps struggle was mentally draining – Blackett
LEE Blackett revealed he felt ‘mentally drained’ by Wasps’ off-the-field struggles leading to their administration being confirmed on Monday.
The head coach was among the 167 Wasps players and staff who were made redundant on Monday as the rugby club’s owning company, Wasps Holdings Limited, went into administration.
Behind the scenes, the 39-year-old has been fighting an increasingly challenging battle as he was hit with recruitment freezes and was unable to offer new contracts with up to 70 per cent of his senior squad entering the final year of their current deals.
While hope remains that a buyer will come in for the rugby side of the business, time is fast running out for Wasps to survive and go again in the Championship next season. I’ve had brief conversations about what could happen next, but what I am trying to do on this, I feel like I’ve been getting little bits of information all the time, I felt mentally drained,” he said.
“This thing changes every hour. There’s someone really interested, they’re going to put a bid in, oh no, now they’re not going to put a bid in.
“Then it’s ‘they’re definitely putting a bid in’. It’s mentally draining.
“It’s been a tiring period while also trying to win Premiership rugby games. I am just trying to get my head straight, make sure there’s options out there and what I am doing next.
“Hopefully there’s a club to go back to. At this moment in time I don’t know. There’s nothing definite. You’d like to think there’s people interested in what a great club this is, but we will see.”
Blackett took over the top job at Wasps following the shock departure of long-serving director of rugby Dai
Young in February 2020. The former Leeds and Rotherham player guided the club through Covid and to a Premiership final in 2020.
In recent times, he has seen the training operation move to a new base at Henley-in-arden, where he and his staff were building a young squad with an increasing amount of talent emerging through the academy.
“I sometimes struggle with hiding my emotions,” he said.
“We’d worked so hard, trying to build an environment, trying to build a culture. Yes, we hadn’t spent as much as the vast majority of sides in the league recently, but we had been doing was building a
really young team, with some really good experience in it.
“The older guys who have been around Wasps for such a long time, we were starting to build something.
“To see that ripped apart, the thoughts of the Willis brothers playing for another team, or Charlie Atkinson not playing for anyone else other than Wasps and England, is just sickening.
“It came across how tight this group was, they’re ridiculously tight, the players and the staff.
“That was the sad part. Some people got angry, I never got to the angry stage. I was just sad more than angry.
“The reality check that these boys you’ve spent a lot of years with and you’ve seen them change and you experience a lot with them, you’re not going to get that experience again with each other.”