Leaving home

Last week I effectively ended my quarter of a century affiliation to Harlequins FC by not renewing my season ticket for the 2017/2018 season by the well-publicised deadline date.

I shall remain a member of the club but I shall no more – well, hang on, even I cannot quite rule out ever – go down to the Stoop in order to watch any more Quins’ home games. Anyone who had read my column on this website will have heard time and again of my frustration and disillusionment with – well, not so much the playing squad themselves per se – but the club generally.

Nevertheless, you know how things are. Once you begin supporting a club, whatever the circumstances (good or bad) that subsequently arise, you never quite stop doing so.

I shall probably end up watch all Quins games that are featured ‘live’ on the television.

This will, of course, save me the chore [perhaps that should read ‘dreaded obligation’] of any longer having to travel down to the Stoop to watch an under-performing team approximately every other week during the rugby union English Premiership season – whilst there gossiping and comparing disappointments and frustration with my fellow supporters in the stands whilst there – and then afterwards trudging all the way home again, sometimes (e.g. on a Friday night game) arriving back at base beyond 10.45pm, which is at least two hours after my standard bedtime.

My key reasons for ‘retiring’ from active supporting of Quins are as follows:-

I am sixty-five years old and that seems a pretty decent age at which to do it.

I last really enjoyed a Quins season in 2012/2013, the year after we became Aviva Premiership champions. Since then – in general terms – on the field of play our playing squad has gone backwards. Or should I say ‘have kept running on the spot’, when in this game – if you are not constantly moving forward – you’re actually going backwards. And we’ve been gradually slipping down the league.

On the field, the last two seasons (2015/2016 and 2016/2017) have been decidedly poor. For all the effort, determination and training, we’ve failed to keep up with the standards – in squad quality terms – required of a potential top four finisher in the league, albeit (to be fair) in the season we finished by qualifying for the top European Cup competition next year by the skin of our teeth.

The truth is that – as with football – to be a consistent challenger for the League title a Premiership rugby club needed to be hobby plaything of a very wealthy owner (or owners) who can buy genuine quality and large playing squads in order to withstand the buggeration factor of losing half your first team to international rugby duty in the autumn and Six Nations periods.

In my view Quins, which I believe in its most recent published annual accounts lost over £2 million, has neither the quality of management (from top to bottom) – nor the right vision, ambition and dynamism – to remain a consistent challenger for honours.

At the moment, and I’m not the only fan that feels this, they’re just going through the motions … and presumably just hoping that something (the Seventh Cavalry?) will turn up to bring back the glory days.

To be honest with you, although I confess to having had a few [heart ruling head] wobbles during April and May about ‘bailing out’, this far into my post-Quins era, I don’t feel any regrets.

I’m not euphoric either, mind. However, I do feel a degree of sense of relief. What’s done is done. I have voted with my feet. There is no point in looking backwards with regret.

It’s like being in a rock and roll band that has made a spectacularly successful first album.

Life has been good these past few years living off the proceeds and the revenue. But I don’t want to go on touring the same songs forever. I want to spread my wings, compose and record a new album … and tour that, not go on forever consigned to playing the hits from the first album until I die.

One door shuts and another door opens – that sort of stuff. There are loads of things I’d like to put my heart and soul into – like I have with Quins for the past twenty five years – that hopefully will freshen up my brain and give me a new lease of life. I’m tired of giving so much to an organisation which gives so little (and sometimes nothing) back.

If I was being hoity-toity about it, I’m better (and deserve better) than that.

I love being part of a team, any team – it doesn’t have to be a sports one – and thereby gain the rewards and spiritual joys that come from belonging to something which is going forward in the right direction and yes, whose whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts because of its special people and their joint enthusiasm and efforts.

The bottom line is that this is all I crave.

I haven’t been getting it from Quins for a long while. And that’s why I’ve quit and am now moving on. I wish everyone involved in Quins – especially their great supporters – every success for next season and in the future.

I’d love to be proved wrong and have to eat my words, if not my hat, if they should hit the heights again at any time during the next five years.

However, I don’t think they will. I shall still support them from afar – I may even attend the odd game (at home or away) and, if the Rust editorial board permits, I shall continue to report on the progress of the team in 2017/2018.

But only from my safety position – i.e. behind my sofa in my drawing room, preferably with crumpets and butter being served with a piping hot cup of tea at half-time.