New season, New hope.

  At long last the waiting is over. Some people may like the summer holidays, but to be honest by the time the calendar flicks over to September I am ready to get back to the normality of crappy British weather, having the central heating on in the mornings, and rugby to look forward to at the weekends.  

One thing we will all agree on is that last season is best forgotten. By the end it was almost torture, and as confirmed recently by Dave Walder, the team had lost all confidence too. So that was then and this is now, let’s put that behind us and look forward. There is good reason to look forward too. Our biggest problem last season was an inability to attack and come away with points. Points may not win us prizes in the coming season but they will certainly move us in the right direction. Last season’s attack coach is now history, we start with a clean sheet & Dave Walder has certainly been saying all the right things about what needs to change. Add to that the shrewd signing of Juan Pablo Socino who is not only a powerful attacking dynamo but also a potent kicking machine, and logic suggests that we will be in a much better position to score points than we were last season.

As part of some changes that we are making at work I went on a management training course. This isn’t usually my sort of thing but actually it was very good. Part of this was a bit of a personality test to see what makes us tick. I was declared to be very much somebody who looks at the big picture rather than the detail, which is a good thing as I would be pretty useless at my job otherwise. That certainly tallies with the way I look at my beloved Newcastle Falcons. To some people what matters is looking at the individual areas of our game, how we will miss the players who have moved on, and what skills new signings can bring. I look at it a slightly different way, I look at the squad as a whole & try to judge if it has what it takes or not.

Last season I reckon we had a good enough squad, they were just doing the wrong things. Certainly by mid-season it was becoming obvious that the forwards were vastly superior to the season before & were well up to standard, but the backs had no Plan A, never mind a Plan B. Criticism fell heavily on whoever wore the 10 shirt, as it always does when the backs just don’t work as a unit, but it was evident that the problems ran much deeper than such a simplistic view. By the end of the season even the forwards were starting to look tired, and my big picture way of looking at things suspected that morale across the board was taking a hammering, and just like the supporters they wanted to get the season over & done with, start again.

So here we are on the eve of the new season, and we all have that chance to start again. The squad without doubt looks like a more competitive animal than before. At this point I should start going into details mentioning Tuilagis, Hammersley, and Socino’s boot, but that detracts from the bigger picture. I don’t like to look at our options at hooker, lock, or who will do the clever stuff behind the five heavy boys, I just look at our strength up front & think we have a pack that should certainly mix it in the Premiership. With the additions made over the summer and the youngsters breaking into the 1^st team our backs should be in a much stronger position to put those all important points on the board. More importantly, the old backs coach has gone & we have a passionate Falcon with new ideas in charge of the pretty boys. Put those together & I see no reason why we shouldn’t have a season to look forward to.

There will certainly be more of us turning up at Kingston Park this season to do this looking forward. Season Ticket sales are the highest they have been for five years. Now this will be partly skewed by the chance to buy RWC tickets, this being enough to tempt some who were in two minds about renewing, but if people have already stuck hands in pockets it has to be a good omen for the support we can expect. And this is where another of my big pictures comes into play. I don’t see Newcastle Falcons as a list of 23 names, not even as a squad of players. I see Newcastle Falcons as players, management, all the staff required to make it all possible. My team also includes the sponsors, the corporates, and almost as important as the players on the pitch, the supporters in the stands. We all have our parts to play, and if any of us fails to try our best, then the whole team is weaker as a result.

As the 2014/15 campaign gets under way I have just one simple message for the team, for all of us:

Believe….

…. and make it happen.