Relegation doesn’t diminish the dizzy highs of a decade
Colin Boag continues his series on Super Fans, this week Saracens’ Jason ‘Large’ Harris
Every club’s supporters experience highs and lows, but for Saracens’ fans that has been taken to extremes: ten years of the best times, and then recently the worst.
Back in 2009 Jason Harris, known to all as ‘Large’, featured in our original Super Fans series, talking about his beloved Saracens. Asked about their prospects for the coming season he commented that the club had new investors in South African billionaire Johann Rupert’s Remgro, a new head coach in Brendan Venter, and a new chief executive in Edward Griffiths.
To describe the decade since then as eventful would be a massive understatement! Until then Saracens had won only a solitary Tetley’s Bitter Cup, and the Courage League Division 2. Since 2009 they have notched up five Premiership titles and three Champions Cups.
They have also had the most spectacular fall from grace that is imaginable, and will spend next season in the Championship. Supporting Sarries during that period must have been an interesting ride?
“It hasn’t been a roller-coaster, as it has been continually on the up throughout that time,” says Harris. “Brendan and his team had an immediate effect, and we got to the final against Leicester – I called the match for BBC local radio and it was a cracking final even though Sarries lost.
“We got our revenge the following year, when Tigers had that famous nine minutes in our 22 trying to get the winning try – I remember it well as I nearly lost my voice! It was a great time to be a Sarries fan, partly because we’d been so terrible for quite a few years – we’d had a long wait!
“Ironically, I think the best match of that decade was the one that we lost to Clermont back in 2015, played at St Etienne. We lost 13-9, and Maro Itoje was a spring chicken in those days, but it was the most wonderful fan experience I’ve ever had. We were outnumbered several hundred to one, but it was absolutely fantastic. I thought I’d go to my grave saying that being in Brisbane for the first Lions Test in 2001 was my best ever rugby experience, but St Etienne beat it.
“It’s hard to choose my favourite players of that era as there were so many. Schalk Brits, Jacques Burger, Owen Farrell, David Strettle, the list just goes on and on. Mako Vunipola came to Sarries in 2011, and was a fat kid, but now he’s a Lions prop and one of the best ever, and he even talks like me as he’s from Wales!”
After all of that success, of course, came the salary cap scandal, and the swingeing punishments dished out. During the glory days did Jason believe the gossip that was going the rounds?
“I worked in the media until the back-end of 2013, and talking to people from other clubs, of course I heard the rumours, and there was always an undercurrent there, usually about cash payments to players. But it was benefits-in-kind that subsequently proved to be the problem. It turned out we’d broken the rules, and it’s only right we were punished. However, I will caveat that by saying the rules weren’t clear, which was how Saracens ended up breaching them by giving Chris Ashton a loan, and doing coinvestments with players.
“When the news broke I was quite stoic, because the rumour mill had always suggested that the players were earning a mint in cash, and in fact it turned out to be a series of misjudgements about the interpretation of the rules. I don’t feel let down by the club, because at the time they entered into those loans and joint ventures, they believed them to be legitimate. Where I am uncomfortable is that I’m not convinced the same rigour was applied in looking at every other club.”
Saracens’ owner, Nigel Wray, came in for some unpleasant abuse in some quarters, which Harris believes was not justified.
“No, not in any way. He was one of the first people in English club rugby to realise the potential of the sport. He took a small club, run out of a park in north London, and decided to make it something significant. Within three years we’d won the cup, in the days when that meant something, and now we have five Premiership titles and three European cups, but what people don’t appreciate is what Nigel has done outside of the club: the Saracens Foundation, the Saracens school, the dance project, the netball project, the kids’ project – and so on.
“Look at the Saracens Pioneers who are the face of the club on match days, meeting and greeting, and looking after safety in the ground – they’re not people on minimum wage doing security and being surly and not properly briefed. The Pioneers are there because they care – they’re volunteers who do it for nothing, and make every supporter’s experience better, be they home or away. They were an Ed Griffiths project on the back of the 2012 Olympics and they’re brilliant.
“Other clubs do those kinds of things now, but it was always Sarries that were first, and that’s down to Nigel Wray, and of course to Ed Griffiths. Nigel’s a proper rugby man – he played on the wing at Old Millhillians – and for him it wasn’t just about the club, it was always about the game. There are people who think that because he’s a multi-millionaire he doesn’t care about the game, but that’s just nonsense.
“He’s been fantastic for professional rugby in England, and deserves a knighthood – almost a sainthood – for what he’s done!”
Have recent events damaged Jason’s loyalty to the club?
“Absolutely not. They’re my club, and have been for more than 25 years since I moved to north London, alongside Neath which was my dad’s, grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s club – they both play in black!
“Next season is going to be interesting, and from a supporter’s point of view it will be wonderful, going to places like Ampthill – Paul Turner’s an old mate of mine – and it will be marvellous for the Championship clubs having the European champions playing at their grounds – hopefully they can make an awful lot of money out of it.”