The end product for the club is a greater flow of rugby-playing youngsters knocking at the door of our colts and academy sides.”Andrew realised before Sir John Hall’s departure that he could not continue signing established players – most of whom are in contract anyway-because it is prohibitively expensive. A combined plan with the university would enable us to develop more pitches. Behind the new stand we want to build a full-size indoor training school alongside an outdoor pitch, similar to what they have at Middlesbrough football club.”Newcastle council are very supportive because they can see that if we get this up and running, the whole community can benefit. Beyond our ground there is Bullocksteads, which is 25 acres of playing fields owned by Northumbria University. It has enabled him to foster a family atmosphere at the club.The trick now is to convince the community that big-time club rugby is a lasting feature of Newcastle’s sporting landscape. The first step will be to replace the temporary stands on the north side of their ground with a permanent structure. This will not only improve the facilities at Kingston Park, but help broaden the club’s revenue-earning base.”Now we have decided to make our home here,” Andrew says, “we want to turn the club into a centre of excellence for the whole region.
His honesty with the players and the back-room staff at Kingston Park is transparent. I’m very impressed with the Newcastle set-up.”Those remarks are a deserved compliment to Andrew, who has created Newcastle in his own image There is never any pretension or bombast with Andrew. But I’m in this for the long haul and reconstructing the side is just one of the things that has to be done.”Andrew’s single-mindedness proved to the players that it could work in the north-east. When the Scotland centre John Leslie opted to join Newcastle next month rather than play for Edinburgh Reivers, Cardiff or London Irish, he said: “Newcastle were by far the best-organised and have the most potential of any of the clubs I could have joined.
Secondly, some players like Alan Tait and John Bentley were at the wrong end of their careers, while Poppy and Tony Underwood have retired through injury So we had no choice but to rebuild. “But I’ve been around long enough to realise that you have to take the rough with the smooth.”When we set out on this journey, the idea was to assemble a group of players who were capable of winning something. Nearly all of them were at their peak, and once we had won the Premiership, I realised that the side couldn’t go on indefinitely.”As Sir John began to lose interest, so players like Pat Lam, Garath Archer and Dean Ryan became targets for other big-money clubs and, reluctantly, we had to say farewell to them. Andrew’s part in this process has been central to all its reforms.Taking Newcastle into Premiership One – where they lifted the title at their first attempt – was only the initial stage of Andrew’s master plan. The next dose of radicalism is soon to be unveiled.”There was nothing here when we began pioneering, and without Sir John we would never have got started,” Andrew reflects. With a young family to care for, he turned his back on a safe and well-pensioned job with a London firm of chartered surveyors to take his chances in the uncertain world of professional rugby union.It was a decision which had nothing to do with Andrew overturning the old order, and everything to do with how he felt about the possibilities which opened up when the game decided to embrace those who wanted to be paid for playing and to rebuff at last the hypocrisy of shamateurism.
When Sir John Hall then announced he was leaving the club to manage its affairs without his millions, the pessimists became more vocal. Not that Rob Andrew was swayed by their judgements.
Andrew is rugby union’s most reluctant revolutionary. Those who accused the Newcastle director of rugby with mutiny when the game went professional after the Paris Agreement of 1995, and the many who blamed him for what followed, when the former England outside-half signed an agreement with Sir John Hall, taking Dean Ryan, Steve Bates and Nick Popplewell from Wasps to Newcastle, have miscast the cherubic Andrew.For there is nothing remotely insurrectionist in Andrew’s nature, though he was then, and is still, a visionary. Before anyone else had even thought about drawing up a business plan, Andrew had seen the big picture and moved with the sort of alacrity few who saw him play believed he possessed.
When Newcastle failed to maintain their title-winning form last season, and were forced to abandon the ruinously expensive experiment of playing their home matches at the spacious Gateshead Stadium, there were plenty willing to forecast that the Newcastle dream would turn into a nightmare. When Sir John Hall then announced he was leaving the club to manage its affairs without his millions, the pessimists became more vocal Not that Rob Andrew was swayed by their judgements. When Newcastle failed to maintain their title-winning form last season, and were forced to abandon the ruinously expensive experiment of playing their home matches at the spacious Gateshead Stadium, there were plenty willing to forecast that the Newcastle dream would turn into a nightmare. Three weeks before its official launch date, the new Jaguar Formula One car – formerly the Stewart-Ford – appeared at a private test session at Silverstone yesterday, painted for the first time in British racing green, although not necessarily the precise shade in which it will been seen at the opening race of the season in Melbourne on 12 March. This weekend the Ulsterman Eddie Irvine and England’s Johnny Herbert take over for fullscale tests at Barcelona and Jerez before the car is officially unveiled in London on Tuesday 25 January.. Jaguar are still looking for the green which shows up most effectively on television, while the weight of the paint is also said to be a factor in the decision.
Yesterday the new car was in the hands of Luciano Burti, the team’s test driver.