Deano: Hero to zero and back again?

Inevitably Deano's career will be forever scarred by the (non-unique?) bloodgate scandal.

But from being an iconic Tigers/England (who on the way as copper nicked my pharmacist for being d&d). A slow, lumbering gorilla of a number eight who teleported himself around the park and won matches on his own.

Next he took over from/deposed the 1991 Oz coach and more than irritating Bob Dwyer.

After a few minor successes he challenged the Tigers' board on the point of wanting to become DoR and dictating recruitment playing policy. So he got a job at Grenoble (remember them?). And subsequently got retained by the Quins after their relegation but after just a season got them storming back and was largely responsible for the successful academy which grew into the force they now are becoming.

Bloodgate (least said...) and a three year ban - and now he's in charge of the Falcons in an indeterminate league due to LW's challenge for promotion.

The point is the man's a genius. And of his kind, he's a self-effacing winner.

Grenoble have just qualified for the T14 btw

Deano is one of the great rugby brains and the game needs him. He did great things for Tigers, and great things for Quins (though, ironically, one of the greatest may have been that because of him we have Conor), and Newcastle will be a much tougher prospect next season.

It will be great to have him back.

He'll always be remembered for one bad thing, but we should equally always remember that he was just the guy that got caught. The Dallaglio report was to my mind a bit of a whitewash - the equivalent of "Fox declares hen-house 'completely secure'", and it's quite telling that the one change to come of it was nothing to do with blood substitutions and everything to do with stopping uncontested scrums...

Next season (whichever league we are in) is going to be very interesting for us Falcon fans.

If we ignore the players, the club itself has been lacking two things in recent years

1) Ambition at the top. Thompson seemingly was satisfied with just keeping the club in existence - no mean feat and I think we owe him a lot for this, but sometimes I feel that there was no spark at the top and this filtered down to the players and fans.
2) Inadequate Coaching. This was probably a consequence of the first point, but for whatever reasons, our coaches just could not motivate the team and give them a strong game plan and a decent plan B

With the advent of semore kurdi we now seem to have ambition - and to prove that, wor Semore has started assembling a good coaching team, Gary Gold showed what could be done with the squad in a short time and Deano's arrival is a hopeful sign of future resurgance.

We had a good academy in previous years, we have proven we can produce the talent, with Deano's past history of favouring academy players AND his leadership we should start being able to hang on to the good young players we produce.

Now I don't see us doing a Quins and zooming up to the top in a couple of seasons, what I would like to see is the Falcons morphing into an Exeter then slowly becoming a Leicester.


We have got to start filling KP though, but a few wins will start bringing them back in, theres a hard core of 3-4k idiots (like me) and that should prove the basis for sellout crows.

Sort the beer out is all I ask.

Mickado wrote:Grenoble have just qualified for the T14 btw

Allez Grenoble!!! I played for the Universite there!! delighted !

Deano is one of the great rugby brains and the game needs him.

This is true but he also needs a strong right hand man. He tends to overlook the issue of kicking points in order to play brutally efficient attacking rugby. This led him into previous messes at Tigers and at Quins. Expect Gopperth to play pretty much anywhere but 10 and allow for the fact that a senior player or two may leave very quickly if they don't conform to the Deano regime.

He'll do good things at Newcastle and the Falcons will be an AP team within a year irrelevent of the LW shenanigans.