When a millionaire biggest spending Sparked the spree in rugby
JUST before rugby went open, Richmond were hanging around the lower end of the Courage League Division 3, but all that was about a change when a Monaco-based metal broker Ashley Levett became their fairy godfather for a short time.
Levett, who had no links to Richmond, had sponsored Winchester Rugby Union when his son played in the mini’s section. He sparked the biggest spending spree the sport had seen, starting with making England No.8 Ben Clarke the game’s first £1 million player.
He also sanctioned moves for the Quinnell brothers, Scott and Craig; Allan Bateman was brought back from Australian Rugby League, while Welsh internationals Andy Moore and Adrian Davies were also lured to the club.
For director of rugby John Kingston, it was like all his Christmases had come at once as he was asked for a shopping list during a meeting at the house of Vinny Codrington, a former fly-half before moving into coaching at the club.
“I went to Vinny’s house and sat there with Symon Elliott, who was the chief executive and Ashley Levett,” remembers Kingston. “It was like, who is the best full-back in the world? Jean-Luc Sadourny was playing for Colomiers at the time. So Levett said, ‘Okay, write that down’, and I think it was Symon who wrote that down.
“They asked if there was anyone else. I had always signed union players who then went to league and then came back to union because it’s a very different game, and I wanted them to settle quickly. Jim Fallon fitted that bill, so did Allan Bateman and Scott Quinnell – quite a few of them. I also mentioned Gary Connelly at Wigan and they said, ‘let’s see if we can get him out of contract’. So I thought, hang on a minute, what’s going on here. What’s the budget? It was just ‘we want to get a great team together’.
“I didn’t necessarily want to spend that much money on full-backs, and I couldn’t ever get a sense of what the actual budget was. What I did know was that Ben Clarke had already signed.”
Kingston, below, says that it wasn’t until later that summer when he wanted to sign Bateman, that he first clashed with the new owners who had a different player in mind that they wanted to sign.
“I wanted to sign Allan Bateman from Cronulla, but there was a lot of pressure on me to sign Scott Gibbs, but I didn’t need Scott, who was a 12, and I had Steve Cotterill, who was a hell of a good player, already with me.
“Yes, Scott was a brilliant player, but I needed a 13. Then out of the blue, I got a message saying, ‘we haven’t got the money to do this’. What? Hang on. Nobody told me what the budget is. The next thing I know is, I’m getting told the salary budget, which off the top of my head, was something like £850,000 a year. “Rugby was new to professionalism, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that wasn’t particularly a great way to run a business. It was absolutely fascinating, you are going from scratch, and you are trying to put
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together a team of players who are going to work well.”
Richmond didn’t get off to the best of starts in the league, drawing their opening game at Coventry 16-16 before demolishing Rotherham and another big-spending side Bedford, before drawing the first of the two games against title rivals Newcastle.
After that, they never looked back, putting 87 points on Moseley while they scored 70 against Nottingham and 72 against Rugby. But Simon Mason, who was in his first year out of university, points out that it wasn’t all plain sailing.
“Everyone just expected Richmond and Newcastle would get up and would have no problems,” said Mason. “But a lot of the teams did have good players. We didn’t start brilliantly at Coventry, and I think it was me who got a late kick. It was just one of those where you are suddenly thinking this isn’t going to be the easy ride that everyone thought. But as the season progressed, it was clear that Richmond and Newcastle were the two best teams. It was mostly straightforward, but it was a tough year.
“Any time you turned up anywhere, you were the team that
everyone wanted to beat and knock your heads off, so in that respect, it wasn’t an easy year. But we were ultra-professional in the way that we trained. It was probably the hardest that I trained in the whole of my career that includes with Ireland.”
Richmond and Newcastle were neck and neck at the top of the table, but the title looked like it was heading to the North-East when the London side lost 37-17 at Kingston Park. It was their only defeat of the season, but the title chase took a dramatic twist only a week later when Newcastle, who had already lost at Coventry, were defeated at Bedford.
Richmond held their nerve, winning their last four games of the season to take the title with 40 points, one more than Newcastle, who amassed 1,255 points, 156 of which came in a home win over Rugby.
“We lost away at Newcastle in what looked like the decider of who would be champions, but then Newcastle unbelievably got beaten by Bedford,” says Mason. “So we ended up being champions, but Newcastle had a very good side. I knew Nick Popplewell from the Ireland set-up.
“They also had Pat Lam and Va’aiga Tuigamala, so even though it was in the Second Division, it was probably the best game going on in the country at the time. There were probably 35 players between the two teams who were capped internationals. It was one hell of a game. I think we were both very confident that we would get up. When you have a starstudded professional team brought together for a lot of money, you are under pressure even if you were scoring 40-50 points a game thinking you could have done stuff better.
“But when we lost at Newcastle, it was a fair result because they outplayed us, and we had our tails between our legs as we headed back to London. Part of my contract was if we got promoted as champions, I got this bonus. And I thought it was gone. Then they were live on TV against Bedford, who turned them over.
“All of a sudden, we were in pole position. A year before, I was a student choosing between a loaf of bread or a beer, and then I got this bonus. It was fantastic!”