Falcons v Newport – Not really a preview

 Today Newcastle Falcons welcome the mighty Newport Dragons to Kingston Park, hoping to maintain their unbeaten record this season. Last weekend saw our beloved Falcons claim another victory, beating today’s visitors convincingly under the guidance of Dean Richards. A victory today will take us out of the pool stages & into the play-offs in a bid to win the much coveted B&I Cup.

Except of course much of what I wrote in that first paragraph is bending the truth to say the least. The visitors today are not Newport Dragons but Newport RFC, a club that I guarantee most Falcons supporters weren’t aware of until recently. The B&I Cup is not much coveted at all, and our victory last week was hardly the stuff to make the supporters talk about the game for years to come, indeed hardly anybody went.

Nobody can deny that we are achieving objectives this season, an unbeaten record half way through the season is evidence enough, but I am getting the feeling that the supporters are starting to get restless, that this isn’t enough. Join in the discussions on the championship message boards and if you identify yourself as a Falcons supporter you will quickly receive comments about the parachute payment, our wealthy club with a powerful squad etc. The implication is clear, we are doing well because we have an unfair advantage.

We have a quality of squad & the strength in depth that comes with it that other championship clubs could only dream about, led by one of the best rugby minds in the business. The faithful supporters know all this of course, and as the new year approaches we are thinking ahead to next season, when we expect to be competing in the Premiership again. This of course is seen as arrogance, such an attitude is not the British way, we should be humble & not speak openly about it. Utter cobblers, like the supporters of any club we should be wanting the best from our team, and with the unfair advantage that we are constantly reminded about, by all rights we should walk it.

And all of this comes down to why I feel the supporters are muttering & fidgeting, and why they are likely to leave unhappy if we see a repeat of last week’s game today. We are now used to the spectacle of grinding the opposition down for the first half, then using our superiority to whack points on them in the second half, except of course we were not just nilled in the second half last week, we leaked a try within the first few minutes. Something was clearly amiss.

To be fair we did not field our strongest team, and again today we see players in the 22 who are getting chances that they might not get so easily for league games. The bulk of the team is still pretty strong however, comments are being made about players who are simply never getting game time even for these cup games, so it is not as if we are putting out 22 juniors. A front row of Shiells, Vickers & Tomahawk is hardly academy team stuff for starters, Hudson & Hogg also give the pack some clout & experience, we should rightly expect good things from this. Cup games are excellent chances to give players like Hodgson a run out, to do the more creative stuff that younger players can bring to the game, but Deano is still playing it safe with Jimmy Gee keeping an eye on things at the back.

On paper we should win this convincingly, and that is what the supporters are starting to expect, we want to be convinced. We want to be in the Premiership, and not just in it, we want to be competitive. We don’t want to be where Worcester are this season, bumping along the bottom & only safe from relegation because there are three teams below them who are utterly hopeless, we want to be competing properly. Now this is where people usually start discussing the gap between the Championship & Premiership, how it is so much closer these days blah blah. Utter tosh, if we have any ambitions to genuinely compete against the likes of Leicester, Northampton, Sarries and Deano’s old club Harlequins, we should be starting to show it by now.

Today is a beautiful day for rugby. The ground should be in pretty good nick, mild weather, no wind to speak of, conditions are ideal. We should expect a good win, but more than that we should expect to see some good rugby. The main grumble amongst the great unwashed is that we don’t see the sort of creative backs play that puts points on the board, well you won’t get a better day than today to try that sort of game. This is a cup game however and I will make allowances for the squad rotation that goes with it, but I would at least like to see some glimmers of hope that we can start looking forward to next season.

Next week is a different matter however. We have home advantage against London Scottish who are hardly setting the world on fire at the moment. I have no doubt that we will win, but will it be what the supporters want to see? Perhaps we should even think the unthinkable, and maybe it could be the loss to shock the coaches & players into upping their game. As I said at the beginning, we want to be convinced. There are only five months of rugby left to prepare for being a decent premiership team next season, not forgetting the small matter of having to get there of course. That isn’t very long, and by now I was hoping to see more. We want to start leaving KP after every game thinking the Falcons had played to their very best, and the mood of supporters of late suggests we are still far from achieving that.

As for being bothered about today’s game, well of course I am bothered, and we all should be. We are in the B&I Cup & we should play to win it. That is something Deano has got right, the winning mentality. We should aim to win the B&I, win the Championship, win the play-offs & then take that winning mentality to the Premiership. And that winning mentality should extend to the supporters too. We should want it, hunger for it, expect it too.That after all is all part of what being a supporter is all about.

Come on Falcons!