How a 10am can of Tetley’s Bitter with 90-year-old war veteran left Dean Richards ‘absolutely gobsmacked’ the morning after his three-year Bloodgate ban
Ex-Harlequins Dean Richards has been speaking about the 2009 Bloodgate scandal, inset
Dean Richards has revealed how a knock on the door from a World War II veteran the morning after he was banned from rugby for three years gave him a timely jolt to stop moping and get on with life.
The ex-England No.8 was banished from the sport in 2009 following the infamous Bloodgate scandal when he was in charge at Harlequins.
With the London club losing a Heineken Cup quarter-final at home to Leinster, Richards hatched an incredible plan that resulted in winger Tom Williams biting a fake blood capsule so that he could be taken off ‘injured’ and replaced by the subbed fly-half Nick Evans in the hope that a late kick from the former All Black could rescue a game they were losing 5-6.
Richards and co. were found out, however, and the subsequent disciplinary ended with the director of rugby copping a 36-month ban that was confirmed in August 2009.
“We’ll have a beer, shall we?”
16 years after that sanction, Richards has explained how a morning-time beer the next day with a 90-year-old changed his outlook on the scandal and started the healing process that resulted in him getting back into rugby as Newcastle boss when the suspension expired in 2012.
Appearing on The Business End, the show hosted by ex-London Irish front-rowers Liam Mooney and Justin Fitzpatrick, Richards described how he was left gobsmacked by the army veteran’s story from the 1940s, and it left him feeling that his rugby ban wasn’t as bad as he thought.
During the interview that was nearly 80 minutes long, Mooney asked: “How did you overcome adversity and rebuild your career and even your reputation?” That became the prompt for Richards to recall a visit the morning after he was branded a rugby pariah.
“I got banned for three years and just touching on that, it was one of these where you do something and you think it’s wrong and you get instincts that it is wrong and you still do it, then you expect everything you get,” he began.
“There I was, the day after being banned for three years, and I was sat at home and a 90-year-old next door neighbour came around, knocked on the door at around half-nine, 10 o’clock in the morning.
“He said, ‘Do you mind if I come in, Dean?’ I said, ‘No problem’. He came in and he had a Tesco carrier bag with four cans of Tetley’s Bitter in it. I said, ‘Do you fancy a cup of coffee?’ He said, ‘No. We’ll have a beer, shall we?’
“He opened the bag, put the beers on the table, we sat down and he said, ‘Have I ever told you my story, my life story?’ I said, ‘No.’
“He then talked me through his experiences of his involvement in the Second World War and he was captured by the Nazis, put in a prisoner of war camp, he escaped, spent six or eight months trying to get across, talked about all this fighting and everything like that.
“So I am sat there absolutely gobsmacked listening to this, what I think is a hero’s story, and he says right at the end, ‘You have got a few problems, have you?’ I said, ‘No. That’s unbelievable what you have told me. I sort of totally understand what you are getting at’.
Nigel Owens opens up on ‘hideous’ Bloodgate scandal and reveals the one thing he is ‘glad of’
“Every problem that you have, you can sort of qualify, quantify, understand where you are and if you relate to something like that, you say the problems I have got are absolutely nothing compared to what this guy has gone through.
“I sat down after he went and I just thought what a lovely bloke, taking the time out, bought four cans of beer and just sat down with me and just said your problems aren’t that bad.
“They seem big at the moment but in time, provided you are honest with yourself and you understand it – A, you f***ed up massively, B, do you love the game? If so, are you out of love with the game and will you come back?
“I had fallen out of love with it a little bit. There was a big battle going on between myself and the lawyers from the ERC. I was trying to find out what I could and couldn’t do.
“For me, the one thing you don’t want to do is compromise your children and everything else like that. I had been saying, ‘What can I do? Can I go and watch my kids play rugby? Is this the extent of it?’ And then it all comes out that I have been challenging it.
Nick Mallett reveals why other Test teams are in ‘serious trouble’ against the Springboks
“But understanding where you stand and accepting it and falling out of love with it for a little while but then watching your kids play and then falling back in love with it through watching your kids playing and getting another opportunity, it was absolutely massive for me because I didn’t think I’d get another opportunity and I had started to look at various other things. To get that second chance at Newcastle was absolutely massive.”
Reflecting further on the fallout from this dubious Bloodgate period in his life, the now 62-year-old Richards explained that the impact on his family was worse than the toll it took on him at the age of 46 when the professional coaching career he had embarked on after being in the police force ended overnight.
“The biggest impact was never on me personally, it was always the family,” he continued. “You always think about your family and the impact on them, your wife, your kids, your parents, your grandparents.
“You worry about the impact on them more than anything and having seen so much in the police and been involved in so much, you tend to rationalise things a lot more easily and you can compartmentalise it and push it to one side and then move forward a little bit.
“But from a kid’s point of view, who are far less resilient than me, and wife and parents who hadn’t seen the same things that I had seen, it is a very different thing altogether.
“That was the biggest impact on me, actually seeing them suffer as a result of my actions. I thought that was terrible and trying to mend those gaps… it wasn’t easy for them at all, and that’s the thing that hurt most of all.”