by By early 2023, Newcastle, under head coach Dave Walder, was gaining momentum. The Falcons had just won four of their last six Premiership games with increasing stability and cohesion. Around the corner, however, the tumult awaited.
At the end of the season, Newcastle lost two of their three starting front rows, George McGuigan and Trevor Davison, as well as Walder. At the beginning of the current campaign, the team had undergone significant changes. Under new head coach Alex Codling, the Falcons currently sit last in the league without a win to their name.
The winds of change had reached the Falcons. The gusts were necessary, Newcastle said, to survive. This was a season, of course, in which three Premiership clubs (Worcester, Wasps and London Irish) went to hell. Financial sustainability and budget adjustment had become not only objectives for the club, but something vital.
Such radical measures would inevitably cause unrest. After all, professional rugby is a cut-throat business with huge sums of money and contracts involved.
However, over time, financial need intersects with treating club members with the respect they deserve, rather than as pieces of meat.
Telegraph Sport has spoken to several sources, some of whom do not want to be identified, who accused the club of major failings in this regard. One of them is Carl Fearns, the abrasive defender who left Newcastle at the end of the previous campaign and who, after a spell in Carcassonne, announced his retirement from the sport last week.
Fearns, 34, felt the need to speak out because of the explosive post-match interview Codling gave following the drubbing at Leicester earlier this month. The Falcons head coach, in his inaugural season in the Northeast, very publicly questioned the club’s direction after a run of difficult results with a relatively underpowered team.
Fearns spent two seasons at Kingston Park, recruited by former director of rugby Dean Richards. Fearns explains that he received a verbal contract offer from the club’s head of recruitment, former hooker Matt Thompson, while having a coffee at the Twin Farms pub, near the Falcons stadium. He says he was then kept on hold for two months with no clarity on his future and no contract offer. Fearns says he didn’t mind having to leave. He understood the budgetary changes taking place at the club, but his indecision and change of heart left him worried about his livelihood and supporting his family. This account has been corroborated by another anonymous player at the club, and Telegraph Sport has seen the communication between Fearns and Thompson.
“Around January 6, I had a face-to-face meeting with Matt Thompson over coffee and he told me he wanted to keep me at the club,” Fearns tells Telegraph Sport. “He said that I was an experienced player and that next season it would be a younger team, and that he wanted to have my experience. He said he wanted to keep me and would send a contract until next week. That’s how it ended.
“A week or two went by and I asked him if he had a contract for me. He said: “No, sorry, nothing at the moment.” He continued, the next week I asked again. “Not at the moment, not yet, sorry,” he said again.
“At the end of January, I sent a message asking if the position had changed. I had a family, I needed to make plans, I could be finishing my degree, I needed to find a job, I had a mortgage. She didn’t respond until I messaged her again in March.
“I’m not a stupid guy. I’m an old professional. I knew what the fun was. After a third week of him saying “not yet,” I knew exactly what was going on.
“I think the man is a coward. You have to treat people the right way. I was pretty decent about it in the messages. I understood that if the club was in a financial situation where the situation around me could have changed. It may have been bad for me to hear it, but I just needed to know if it was yes or no.
“In March I told him what I thought and he responded saying thank you for the message and that the club was looking for a new coach. That’s all I have, really. I never got a direct answer.
“I felt something was wrong. “If I was a young player, it could have been a case where I would have been gone at 12 hours without a job, without a family.”
Telegraph Sport has since met with Thompson and Semore Kurdi, Newcastle’s owner, where the duo admitted failures in communication over Fearns’ lack of contract renewal, explaining that the club was in a period of transition, with sustainability and a long-term project. based on a core of youthful talent: the goal, but the treatment received by their former defender should not have happened.
“We were sad to hear last week that Carl will be retiring from professional rugby, but he can look back on a great career,” Newcastle told Telegraph Sport in a statement.
“In retrospect, we recognize that communication regarding his contractual situation could have been handled more clearly, but we thank Carl for his service and wish him all the best for his life after rugby.”
The departure of lineout coach Scott MacLeod from the club, explains Fearns, is another example of poor treatment. With the arrival of Codling, whose specialty is lineout, Thompson informed MacLeod by telephone at the end of last season that his services would not be needed at the club for the following campaign. An hour later, unaware that the former lineouts coach’s contract had not been renewed, Codling called MacLeod to ask what he would bring to the coaching staff next season. Newcastle declined to respond to Fearns’ account of MacLeod’s departure, although the club is understood to have apologized privately.
“I feel sympathy for Alex because, like I said, I know what’s going on at the club,” adds Fearns. “But if he had done due diligence on him before arriving, he might have understood what was going on at the club. But, Thommo, like he did to me, maybe he promised him things he was never going to get? Maybe that happened? All he had to do was do his due diligence – it was clear how the club was going, getting rid of all the experienced forwards in the group.
“If they want to act accordingly, that is their right, but you have to treat the players as human beings and treat them well.
“We had one of the best line-outs in years under Scott MacLeod and he is a great coach. Getting rid of him made no sense.”
The departures of McGuigan and Davison were high profile; not just because the duo were members of the England squad or in the conversation for international call-ups, but because they arrived mid-season, with immediate effect, three months apart, and both players left for Premiership rivals . A source who did not want to be named told Telegraph Sport that Davison was left crying on the side of the training pitch.
“The way George left the club… We arrived on a Monday and George just stood up in a team meeting and said, ‘Lads, I’m going to Gloucester.’ Some of the coaches didn’t even know,” Fearns says. “When things like this happen, the entire team, which, with less funding, depended on being a close unit, began to wonder why we were doing it, if people were being treated like this.
“Trevor was going to Northampton, but then he wasn’t. I think they told him the deal was off, then he came in one day and Thommo told him he was going to the Saints tomorrow. It seemed as if the movements had been imposed on both George and Trevor.
“In the end, I felt sorry for Dave and all the staff who stood in front of us and gave us messages about being ‘true north’ and being united as a group, but more than just cutting their legs out from under them was happening on a weekly basis. “I would have left if I were Dave.”
Newcastle declined to comment on the departures of McGuigan or Davison when approached by Telegraph Sport. It is understood, however, that factors beyond the club’s control and external contractual negotiations were part of the reason for the immediacy of the departures of both players.
