‘Piranhas looking to take our players’

IF the way that Ashley Levett pulled the plug on Richmond was brutal, it was nothing compared to the bloodletting they suffered at the hands of English First Division Rugby, who then ran the Premiership.

In early 1999 Richmond looked well-placed for success. They were riding high in the Premiership and were about to beat Leicester to reach the Tetley’s Bitter Cup semi-finals when Levett decided that he had ploughed enough millions into the club and was ending his funding.

Levett’s move came just after Sir John Hall had revealed that he was walking away from Newcastle Falcons, and John Kingston believes that he was just biding his time, not wanting to be the first of the new breed of owners to walk away.

Kingston says: “One of the first questions I asked him was: ‘Why is it Richmond? You aren’t even a Richmond fan.’ This wasn’t like Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers. I got why Frank Warren looked at Bedford because it was a town club. They got big support at the time.

“But why are you going to Richmond when you look around at the clubs in the area. Richmond didn’t even own their ground. It’s owned by the crown. So I think he very quickly became a tired owner, and I think the minute he saw an opportunity to get out of the casino, he cashed his chips in.

“That trigger was when Sir John Hall walked. Newcastle Falcons announced they were losing Sir John around January or February 1999. I remember it distinctly because I remember phoning my old friend from Cambridge, Rob Andrew.

“He was gutted because he thought the wheels were coming right off, and I said, ‘look, you and I can have a conversation about you coming back down south’. It was only about four weeks later that the whole thing started to unfold from Richmond’s point of view.

“I think the bottom line was once Ashley realised the thing was haemorrhaging money, because how could it make money? It just couldn’t. The numbers didn’t add up. Ashley was keen to get out as long as his pride was kept intact in terms of the fact that he wasn’t the first to call a halt.”

Richmond were plunged into administration, but Kingston believes that they could have come out if rival clubs in the English First Division Rugby had given them time, but instead, they were just interested in picking over the bones, only looking out for themselves.

“The club spiralled quickly into administration, and the knock-on effect was the club tried to reconstruct, and it would have done if the other clubs had allowed it to breath,” Kinsgton adds. “But they were all piranhas and looked to take players out of Richmond, and saw an opportunity to cut the pie by two less because London Scottish had their own financial problems at the same time.”