So it’s not just me, then …

As it happens yesterday evening I popped out for a quiet drink with a couple of pals before dinner and after about half an hour by chance we found ourselves sitting within earshot of some Quins fans I’d never met before who were discussing the club’s current fortunes. Stuff inevitably happens and before long we’d joined the brains trust.

Regular readers will be familiar with my endless griping about the ‘state of the nation’ down at the Stoop. It’s a sad fact of life – well, mine anyway – that my love affair with the club has soured in recent seasons. There was a time, ten to fifteen years ago, when my institutionalised background and desire to belong to something as irrationally compelling as sports team following (irrespective of the slings and arrow of outrageous fortune) made Harlequins a huge part of my life.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that in those days a good deal of my waking existence was built around the joys of seeking out the rugby gossip in the media, the week-long build-up to a game and (as often as not) the match day trek across London to become part of proceedings at the Stoop, both on and off the pitch.

My regular schedule involved a meet with similarly minded folk in one of the innumerable pubs in the vicinity of Twickenham for the craic of the occasion, a four-pints-and-a-pie-and mash lunch, an anticipatory trudge to the ground, the buzz, colour and craziness of the atmosphere the hour or so to kick-off which seemed to speed by in a haze of warm-ups, contacts with opposing fans, another pint (for the game), a trip to the gents, and then the match itself, and then a migration to the East Stand bar for the after-show party which usually involved as chance to mingle, maybe exchange a word with the odd player having his post-match meal, and then watch a live band playing some good-quality cover versions of great rock and pop music anthems of the past fifty years before the trip home to bed.

And that was only the home matches. My little group used to mount league expeditions to the likes of the Recreation Ground (Bath), Welford Road (Leicester Tigers), Sixways (Worcester Warriors) and occasionally others, merely for the spiritual rewards of ‘being on tour’ and a lost weekend – maybe in the process ‘catching up’ with long-lost mates who had moved to those vicinities years before. We also travelled to the continent – Stade Francais in Paris etc., Cardiff and Limerick in Ireland, all in the cause of supporting the men in quartered-coloured shirts.

During one stretch of seven or eight years – bar the really naff stuff, of which Quins was not in short supply – I must have purchased just about every item of wearable Harlequins merchandising clothing (replica home and away shirts, polo shirts, T-shirts, shorts, playing socks, plus also memorabilia items like wallets, pens, key-rings, tankards, mugs) simply for communal sense that I was a part, however small, of what was happening at ‘my’ club.

Those days – and such minor triumphs as came our way, the travails of the ‘relegation’ season (and then the amazing year we spent in the championship – probably one of the most enjoyable and meaningful season of the lot – together with Bloodgate and its aftermath and then the departure of Deano and the arrival of Conor O’Shea) – all seem a long, long time ago now.

It took yesterday’s session, in the company of vets of the same ‘army’ (even those I’ve never met before as was the case last night) with whom I shared a common history and loyalty, to remind me of what I once had – and also crystalise starkly the depressing home truths of the downward slope upon which the club is now picking up speed.

Mention was soon made of the front page story in The Rugby Paper at the weekend hinting that our England players Mike Brown (32 in September) and Danny Care (just turned 30) are ’considering their options’. In one sense it’s all perfectly understandable because a rugby career is statistically a short one for all the understandable reasons (sheer physicality not least among them) and players have to make the most of it financially whilst they can because they are always only one game away from a career-ending injury.

Nevertheless, what struck me was the fact that Brown – according to the report, on the radar of Exeter Chiefs and Leicester Tigers among others – has been fed up for years with Quins’ failure to ‘push on’ after our epic Premiership win. A competitive warrior like him wants to be winning things because he knows he’s going to be a long time retired when that decision comes. Ideally, he’d like to have done that with Quins (having been with them man and boy) but with the club slipping down the league table season-by-season since the heady times of 2012 it’s quite clear to ‘Asbo’ – as we used to call him because of his belligerence – that the prospects of Quins winning anything in the foreseeable future is nil.

Why? Because in elite sport, if you don’t keep going forward, if you’re ‘marking time’, you’re actually going backwards compared to everyone else. And that’s what Quins have done.

I was slightly shocked to learn that the strong feeling of the meeting last night was that, with the prospect of London Irish coming back up into the Premiership next term – and Bristol (though doomed this season) backed by serious money and still signing worthwhile people – Quins are not only expected to be cast-iron candidates for the relegation fight in 2017/2018 but, if they go down, they’ll be singularly ill-placed for a swift return to the top flight.

I don’t want to sound like a stuck record by repeating my own criticisms, but when you hear them unsolicited from fellow fans you’ve never spoken to before, you cannot help but feel “I’m not the only one then” – and that’s a depressing realistion all on its own.

The current season has been a complete damp squib, of course. The club’s management went through the motions of trying to emulate Bath’s 150^th anniversary last season (a non-event if ever there was one, which should have been a warning) but – as usual with anything this regime does – it’s gone off at half-cock.

The hastily-organised commemorative match with the NZ Maoris, a supposed centrepiece of the 150^th celebrations, ended up being a midweek evening game with Quins fielding an inferior team and getting beaten at a canter. It just about summed up everything that was wrong with the club.

Above all – and this sounds so supremely obvious that it barely needs stating – the one and only thing that would make any major anniversary a fitting tribute – was success on the pitch.

Quins had already demonstrated its ineptitude and lack of ambition, after a long and wide-ranging, worldwide, highly publicised search for an O’Shea replacement as Director of Rugby who would make the rugby world sit up and take notice, (having failed abjectly to persuade any world class club coach to take the slot) by announcing that loyal servant John Kingston was to be promoted to the post from within.

No disrespect to Mr Kingston, but he was on a hiding from the start. Apart from anything else, what did his appointment signal to the playing squad – especially those who had been attracted to come to the club by the now-invalid representations regarding the direction and ambition of the club made by the silver-tongued O’Shea (who within months then departed for international pastures anew)?

One of those in last night’s gathering, who seemed a whole deal closer to the inside of the club than anyone else, testified that the mood within the playing squad, and indeed the management generally, was resigned and full of gloom. As he put it, you only have to look around at the Premiership clubs with wealthy, dynamic backers of substance – e.g. Bath, Wasps, Exeter Chiefs, Leicester Tigers and Saracens – to see where the club game in England is headed. Measured against those standards, and failing the unlikely scenario of unearthing a Sugar Daddy with more money than sense, preferably in Russia, Malaysia or China, Quins is now firmly consigned to the ‘also ran’ basket and time is running out.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that the past three seasons of Quins-supporting have each been a progressively less enjoyable experience for me on a personal level. There’s something to be admired in any fan’s attitude of ‘My team, through thick and thin’ (we all subscribe to that) but – at the very least – you have to have hope, especially in the darker times, that somebody, or even better a group of senior executives, of outstanding quality is at the helm is working to a plan and a sunnier future. And above all else, inspiring people. There’s precious little of that sense of positivity and purpose coming out of Quins these days.

I guess in the final analysis you have to clutch at straws and see the best of things in any situation. Previously part of my despair about my own growing sense of “Oh, what’s the bloody point?”, even dread, about travelling to the Stoop each time to watch Quins’ insipid performances this season was grounded in the thought that it was only me who felt like I did. I was assured by the group last night that I shouldn’t worry – apparently I’m totally in tune with the vast bulk of loyal Quins fans.