'It's an eye-opener...': The rebuilding of Leeds in National One
It will be a very different Leeds Tykes that takes the pitch on January 8 under new head coach Jon Callard for its first league match to be played at Headingley in 22 months. When the plug got pulled in March 2020 on Yorkshire Carnegie’s death roll in the Championship, they were a professional outfit going down the tubes, paying an embarrassingly heavy price after years of rot and slippage.
The trail of destruction that season was jolting. Fourteen matches, fourteen defeats, a shocking points difference of -528, 436 points worse than the second-worst team in the division. A 73-26 hammering by London Scottish in front of a meagre home crowd of just 306 people was the pre-lockdown sign-off.
Tom Varndell was one of those swamped by the wounding collapse. As the Premiership’s all-time record try-scorer, his career had mostly been about scoring and challenging for trophies at the elite end of the English game with Leicester and Wasps, not slumming it at the wrong end of the second-tier table.
“It’s hard to feel any positivity with that,” he told RugbyPass a couple of months after he had finished up at Carnegie. “It was hard and there were a lot of dark conversations. It was just tough. When you are getting flogged 60 points to nil and you are trying your hardest and it makes no difference, it’s tough no matter who you are and what experience you had.
“It was tough but I have to give full credit to all the players and all the coaches. Martyn Wood was there before Phil Davies came in and they have done a fantastic job. They just weren’t given the resources to do the job fully and that is no one’s fault, it’s circumstances.”
ICYMI: "There were times when I was in the car with the coach and players would be phoning in saying they couldn’t do anymore because it was affecting their actual work life."
– Ex-England wing Tom Varndell w/@heagneyl ??? last April after relegationhttps://t.co/7TNasKcRDZ
— RugbyPass (@RugbyPass) January 3, 2021
If ever a club needed the lockdown to reset and eventually go again, it was Yorkshire. They accepted the grim reality that they would now be a National One outfit, changed their title back to Leeds Tykes, their name when they were famously crowned Powergen Cup champions at Twickenham in 2005, and set about taking baby steps at The Sycamores, the Yorkshire Three northern division home ground of West Park which they are now using for matches – except for their one-off Headingley return in three weeks.
Ex-Wales international Davies, the Namibian boss at the two most recent World Cups, is still very much involved but with the early months of their maiden campaign at National One level recently proving a struggle after they had waited more than a year to get started due to the English third-tier league getting cancelled in 2020/21 (just two win in nine), additional help. has arrived by way of the November 17 appointment of Callard as head coach.
It’s 16 years since the ex-England full-back coached with Davies in a Premiership level set-up that also had Stuart Lancaster and Simon Middleton, the recently voted World Rugby coach of the year, on board in a 2004/25 cup-winning campaign where Leeds finished eighth and twelfth-place Harlequins were relegated.
But the return of Callard, who originally left to take up an RFU academy position, has ignited a bounce in results, Leeds winning their two most recent matches to lift them to 14th in the 15-team division that has been affected by virus-enforced cancellations in recent weeks.
“It’s an eye-opener, to say the least, but the game of rugby still fulfils its enjoyment at whatever level,” explained Callard to RugbyPass when asked why an ex-England assistant under Brian Ashton and Martin Johnson has now decided to give back to the club located down the road from his Harrogate home.
“There is that emotion as I have been there before with the club and also it is on the doorstep as a local club as well. It hasn’t gone too well. I have been very critical of it not going well and somebody said, ‘Well put up or shut up’. I decided to try and give a hand and see where we can go with it.
“I had three years of good memories at Leeds in the Premiership and to see it just slip away… if it weren’t for some very generous people it probably would have fallen as a club.
“There are some special clubs in Yorkshire but Leeds needs a rugby club. It has got a lot of young people who are playing the game in the local area and it just needs a rugby club, simple as that. That is why I was critical to see it nearly folded and luckily there were a few hard-working people who really saved the club and have given it a chance in National One.
“Phil hasn’t changed, but there are different facilities, we are a different side, different players, a lot of young players and that is what I like to think is one of my strengths from being with the union in a developmental role for twelve years.
“I am very passionate about development and we have got one or two that can play Premiership and it is about giving the opportunity to those. In this moment of time, it is just about making the best of those players and giving them an experience that helps them better themselves.
“Rugby is a brutal results business but forget our aspirations, I am not going to say here, ‘Oh, we are a Premiership club’. That would be delusional, I’d be run off to the funny farm if I said that.
“It’s just about growing what we have got, trying to get a connection in the community, give an opportunity to players who have got aspirations. If we do well in the meantime, great, but if we can help those people on their journey to become Premiership players or even better, international players, then fantastic.
“We have got to be realistic about where we are and what we are doing, and also it has to be sustainable. We just can’t rely on the goodwill and the generosity of certain individuals and spend money willy nilly.
“We have to be sustainable and rugby has to become accountable for sustainability as well because it is not about take, take, take and then just get rid of people and then they are lost from the sport altogether. We have to make it an inclusive sport that people can say, ‘Yeah, I can still play rugby at a decent level but I can still have a career elsewhere’.”
The first impression is that this current Leeds squad reminds Callard of his own late 1980s/early 1990s days experiences playing at Bath. “A lot of players have come out of university, a lot are university-educated which is fantastic. That means they have got the discipline to learn and develop themselves.
“We have got IT consultants, financial consultants, builders, a surveyor, a legal trainee, teachers, so we have got a mix and it’s almost like the old days at Bath where you used to train two nights a week and there were people coming from all walks of life. Surgeons like Jon Webb, sparkies in Nigel Redman, farmers in Graham Dawe. It was unique. We don’t have any farmers at the moment and I would like a few as they are tough guys.”
Our supporters' evening has just started. @jakeybrady with Jon Callard and some of the squad pic.twitter.com/JZ6hHUFDMt
— Leeds Tykes (@LeedsTykes) November 30, 2021
Aside from the wins over Cambridge and Tonbridge Juddians, a lovely comment from one of the players and some useful feedback at a supporters Q&A night has Callard enthused about what 2022 might bring for Leeds. “We got 35 fans there which I thought was unique for a club like Leeds in its infancy regrowing. There was some great feedback,” he said, adding, “It has been enjoyable.
“A lovely comment that I wholeheartedly support is we have won two games but we haven’t put a performance together and I liked that comment coming from a player because they feel we are not just satisfied with a win, we want to keep building. That is certainly something that I would advocate.
“The club is very strong now in building a community club that is sustainable and hopefully puts a product on the field that attracts people to come and watch and get involved in.
“I certainly want to grow the links with universities around us and the other clubs. We have got to all work together, to be honest. We are not in competition, we have got to work together as clubs in Yorkshire because it is a very proud rugby county.
MATCH VIDEO | Here are our tries from yesterday’s match v @tjrfu scored by @Harry_Robinson5
? ?
You can watch the full match ??https://t.co/WP1W4uYlFs
Subscribe and never miss any new Leeds Tykes’ videos#Honesty#Team1st#NoExcuses#WorkHard pic.twitter.com/zrGaxbCDzL— Leeds Tykes (@LeedsTykes) December 5, 2021
“If we don’t, if we just fight each other and squabble and whatever it is, we will come up short. Otley is doing great stuff at the moment, Harrogate is a very proud club, Ilkley is a lovely club, you have got Hull Ionians doing very well. I would love to think that one day we can all support each other and grow to be as successful as we all possibly can.”
There are limits regarding what can be done given the grassroots nature of this restyled Leeds operation but Callard, who has got other rugby projects going on and is doing kicking work in football, has vowed to give it his best.
“This is a part-time role, two nights a week plus Saturdays even though it is a bit more than that at the moment. You can certainly get clawed into it. It just consumes you at times like all things but there is a lot of hard work to be done. We are where we are in the league and it is a tough, physical league.
“My philosophy of the game is we should utilise all strengths and play right across the park and sometimes that is not possible because of the resources and the personnel that we have, but you still have to have your theories and principles of playing the game in order to get it across.
?The Gregory Property Group sponsors Leeds Tykes vs Rosslyn Park?
A special day awaits at Headingley Stadium on Saturday 8 January. All the details ?https://t.co/WW1jmOyUjo pic.twitter.com/kzkH5yA6rk— Leeds Tykes (@LeedsTykes) December 13, 2021
“I have developed an app with a company in Wales and we have individual development plans rolling out to the players that will be interactive over the phone and will all be logged and stored. After a weekend, I’ll go through the game as quickly as I can with all my comments chronologically through the game.
“It’s not a question of saying, ‘That was rubbish, this was rubbish and you were rubbish’. No, quite the opposite. It’s what are we doing here, how do we get better, how do we improve on this? It is all interactive online because we only have two-and-a-half hours a week of training on the field.
“I don’t want to come into the club and take that training up with video time. We do all that work online, we come ready to train and we are slowly growing that which is exciting.”
Comments on RugbyPass
Article intéressant ! La question devrait régulièrement se poser pour les jeunes français originaires de Nouvelle-Calédonie, Wallis-et-Futuna et de Polynésie entre la Nouvelle-Zélande et la Métropole… Difficile pour la fédération française de rugby de se positionner : soit le choix est fait de dénicher les jeunes talents et de les faire venir très tôt en Métropole, au risque de les déraciner, soit on prend le risque de se les faire “piller” par les All Blacks qui, telle une araignée, essaye de récupérer tous les talents des îles du Pacifique… À la France de se défendre en développant l’aura du XV de France et des clubs français dans ses collectivités d’Outre-mer !
2 Go to commentsWrong bay. He needs to come to the REAL BAY which is Bay Of Plenty and have a crack at making the Chiefs.
2 Go to commentsIs Barrett going play full back??? They already have all the centers…
15 Go to commentsForgive my ignorance, I might not fully understand so would appreciate clarification: Didn’t the Bulls have to fly with three different carriers, paid for by the South African Rugby Union, whilst Edinburgh got a chartered flight sponsored by EPCR? Also, as far as I understand it South African teams don’t yet share in the revenue from the competition and are not allowed to host Semi-finals or Finals at home. Surely if everyone wants South Africans to “take the competition seriously” then they must make South Africans feel welcome, allow them to share in the revenue, and give them the same levels of access as the teams from the other countries. Just a reminder that South Africa has a large and passionate Rugby audience. Just by virtue of our teams being a part of these competitions means that more of us are likely to watch the knockout games, even if our teams haven’t qualified. It would be silly to alienate such a large audience by making them feel unwelcome.
18 Go to commentsFirst of all. This guy is very much behind the curve. All the bleating, whingeing, whining and moaning took place days ago already. Not adding anything to the topic other than more bleating, whingeing, whining and moaning. 🍼 Second of all, not one mention of the fact that South African teams can’t get home semi finals or finals. The tournament was undermined and devalued by the administrators. 🤡 Thirdly, football teams often have to juggle selections in mid week games, premier games, champions league games etc. and will from time to time prioritize certain titles over others. 🐒 And lastly FEK Neil, and anyone else for that matter, for insisting on telling teams how to manage themselves. If they make what is largely a business decision that suits them and doesn’t suit you - tough shite. 💩 It’s not rocket science as to why the Bulls did what they did. If this guy is too slow to figure it out (and is deliberately not mentioning one of the key reasons why) then he isn’t a journalist. He should join the rest of us pundit plebs in comments section. 🥴
18 Go to commentsSo the first door to knock on Rob is Parliament followed by HMRC. The Irish Revenue deliver a 40% tax relief rebate on the HIGHEST EARNING TEN YEARS of every pro Irish rugby players contract earnings at retirement. That goes a long way to both retaining their best talent and freeing up wages for marquee players. Who knows, if that had been in place in the UK, you might not have been able to poach Hoggy and Jonny Gray from Glasgow…!!!
2 Go to comments1. True, if that “free” ticket means access to all but the prized exhibit - EVIP only. SA cannot host semis, even if they’ve earned it (see Sharks vs ASM Clermont Auvergne at… Twickenham Stoop). 2. Why no selective outrage over Lyon doing the exact same thing a week earlier? Out of all the countries France send the most “B teams”, why nobody talking about “disrespect” and “prioritising domestic leagues” and “kicking them out”? 3. Why no mention of the Sharks fielding all of their Springboks for the second rate Challenge cup QF? No commitment? 4. Why no mention of all the SA teams qualifying for respective euro knock out comps in the two seasons they’ve been in it? How many euro teams have qualified for KO’s in their history? Can’t compete? 5. Why no mention of SA teams beating French and English giants La Rochelle and Saracens? How many euro teams have done that in their history? Add no quality? The fact is that SA teams are only in their second season in europe, with no status and a fraction of the resources. Since joining the URC, SA has seen a repatriation of a number of players, and this will only grow once SA start sharing in the profits of competing in these comps, meaning bigger squads with greater depth and quality, meaning they don’t have to prioritise comps as they have to now - they don’t have imports from Pacifica and South America and everywhere else in between like “European” teams have - also less “Saffas” in Prem and T14, that’s what we want right? 'If the South Africans are in, they need to be all in' True, and we have to ensure we give them the same status and resources as we give everyone else to do just that. A small compromise on scheduling will go a long way in avoiding these situations, but guess what, France and England wont compromise on scheduling because they ironically… prioritise their domestic comps, go figure!
18 Go to commentsthe success of the premiership can be summarized by : only 10 teams. It makes a huge difference with the overcrowded top 14 (let us not talk about Leinster and URC…)
1 Go to commentsGood for him. The ABs were fooling around again with converted fullbacks that had a penetration of a marshmallow. Laumape or as Aki has shown for Ireland, go forward is important in the centres. If it had been DMac - Aki- Aumua - Ioane- Telea- Jordan in France the final result would have been different.
4 Go to commentsDan Carter a apporté son professionnalisme, des méthodes de travail, un esprit qui manquaient à l’USAP. Son influence, même une fois blessé a été énorme. Et pour citer une anecdote, certains soirs il venait de lui-même à l’entraînement des jeunes pour dispenser ses conseils. On ne peut pas compter ce qu’il a apporté au club en heures de jeu sur le terrain. Est-ce que le club en a eu pour son argent ? Avec la publicité sur son nom et le titre, je suppose que oui.
1 Go to commentsThe SA sides are suffering from a bum rap here. There isn’t a side anywhere in the world that would do things differently in their shoes. They’ve been set up to fail in the EPCR comps by vested interests, with last minute intercontinental travel requirements that costs an arm and a leg to book in advance just on the possibility they might be required. And the total nonsense that denies any chance of home venues is entirely biased and absolutely unsporting. Either EPCR, the Top14 & the Gallagher Premiership get it sorted on a fair and equitable sporting basis for ALL participants or expect the ridicule to continue. Right now, these comps are a joke!
18 Go to commentsSA sides should do the right thing and leave the champions cup, they are lowering the standard with completely one sided games, not up to the right level. The greatest club tournament in the world is being banjaxed by the weak SA sides.
18 Go to commentsCouldnt agree more. SA sides need to show more committment and really have a go at the Champions Cup. Its quite possibly the most prestigious title in Europe and SA sides need to respect that prestige and serve up their best. EPCR needs to do more to ensure that sides from South Africa and sides travelling to and from SA have a better chance in this competition. The Bulls were put in a really difficult position of having to travel there and back in one week. One could argue that this is what the SA sides signed up for and that La Rochelle didnt complain or send out weakened sides despite having to travel to SA and back and play on successive weekends but surely the situation is also unfair on La Rochelle as well and so EPCR needs to think about successive gameweeks and the travel effect of the competition
18 Go to commentsI hadn’t watched much Canes this season but sat through a replay of that Chiefs game with no distractions. That pack is beastly. I really like the look of Iose. He loves the tough stuff. The first Quins clip may be the best I have even seen for a TH driving his opposite into oblivion. i need to take your word for the contribution of Walker, but Collier there with a straight back pushing up from under was a lovely thing to see. Have you fallen in love with Baxter also, Nick? I think Stuart Barnes may have written his column about him recently, naked. He positively frothed.
14 Go to commentsSmart guy. I wish he was running the RFU or something!
2 Go to commentsWhy Barrett, when Leinster already have at least 4 top centres.?
15 Go to commentsGood write up, Brett. Rebels are an interesting one for sure. 88 points scored in the last two games, but against two teams that are unlikely to be in the top 4 at seasons end. However the other side of the coin, against the Hurricanes, the team to beat atm, they conceded 54 points, and add in another 53 points to the then high flying Reds, and things don’t look so good. The acid tests will be against the Blues and the Chiefs. I do hope they do contest the finals this year, if only to confound those working on their demise. Les Kiss has made a big difference to the Qld. Reds, and they could so easily have now been sitting unbeaten at the top of the table. But they have now lost some games in a most disappointing fashion, and now step up against the Highlanders this weekend seriously depleted, four absolute key players down, two to suspension, two injured. Of the other Australian sides, the Brumbies look unlikely to fold to anyone any time soon, while the Waratahs and Force both disappoint. But still and all, winning games against the NZ sides is very welcome, and one would hope for more to come. Who will come out on top ? A North Island side for sure should contest the final, but I would hope an Australian side might just get there this year. Brumbies most likely, Qld. Reds could be formidable with a full team back on the field.
12 Go to commentsThe stat that illustrates some progress compared to recent years is that Aussie sides have won 5 of 12 games against Kiwi sides. The Tahs have lost 2 tight games against Kiwi sides, while the Reds and Tahs have contrasting experiences in games against Kiwi sides decided by that farcical thing called golden point.
12 Go to commentsThe Hurricanes pack has stepped up in a huge way this year. Their improvement at scrum time has been a big contributor to their success. Aumua looks like he is playing with a lot of confidence and put in a really good display at both set piece and in general play on Saturday. Him and Numia are putting in a good case for higher honours, A dominate combination with Lomax will help their case. And their loose forward depth is class. Iose has benefited from regular game time and Lakai has shown his versatility and promise. Thanks Nick. Hope all is well.
14 Go to commentsSamoa have enough former internationals who want to flick a switch for a country most have probably hardly set foot in. If you’re that passionate about Samoa, go live and play rugby there to qualify instead of just waltzing into the side and kicking a player actually from Samoa out of the squad. All these ex internationals hasn’t really made them that much more competitive because most look like they're going through the motions.
2 Go to comments