Remembering World Cup winning All Black Piri Weepu at London Welsh
Piri Weepu prepares to feed into the scrum for London Welsh against the Dragons
CREDIT: Dan Mullan/Getty Images
In the days before two players could be excluded from the Premiership Rugby salary cap, many clubs would spend a huge portion of their budget on one superstar player.
With a huge chunk taken out of the pot, these players would then be an island of quality amongst their peers - hopefully dragging teamates up to their level while adding stardust.
Think Justin Marshall at Leeds Tykes in 2005 or Chris Latham at Worcester in 2008 - with the former relegated and the latter coming second bottom.
It is an interesting dynamic having players of such obvious ability coming into, with all due respect, a team that is not up to their level.
It is natural for frustration to grow along with disillusionment as loss after loss hits morale and doubts creep in.
This is the situation that Piri Weepu surely must have found himself in when at London Welsh in the 2014/15 season.
The 73 cap, World Cup-winning former All Black took the leap and arrived at the Premiership new boys in the summer of 2014 - only lasting until February the next year.
Here, The Flanker remembers his doomed spell at London Welsh and how the famous old club - who will have broken the bank to sign him - would dissolve just three years later.
“Keep Calm - Piri’s On”
The 2014/15 season would be the nadir of a club that was once arguably the most famous club side in the world.
In their 1960s and 70s heyday, superstars JPR Williams, Gerald Davies and John Dawes would turn out at Old Deer Park.
Many decades later, a World Cup winner would rock up at the outfit to strut his stuff.
Although he made his New Zealand debut in 2004, it is in the 2011 World Cup where Weepu had his finest hour in a black shirt before heading to England.
The man from Wellington was the first choice scrumhalf throughout the tournament but is in the quarter-final victory over Argentina where the ragamuffin halfback cemented his name in folklore.
Not renowned for his goalkicking, he was forced to step into the breach after Colin Slade and Dan Carter were injured in earlier games.
Helping himself to 21 points and the man of the match award in a 33-10 victory, Weepu would go on to lift the trophy at the spiritual home of Kiwi rugby, Eden Park.
Piri Weepu shows off his 2011 World Cup winners medal
CREDIT: Coloursport
As goalkickers fell by the wayside, Kiwi fans had t-shirts printed saying “Keep Calm - Piri’s on” as they marched to claim the William Webb Ellis trophy for only the second time.
Three years on, he swapped the cauldron of Eden Park and for the near-empty Kassam Stadium, Oxford and a relegation fight with London Welsh.
The club had spent big and brought in over 20 new signings as they tried to go one better than their 2012/13 Aviva Premiership season in the top flight and survive.
Given many Premiership clubs make their signings for the next season before the previous one has ended, London Welsh had undertaken a shopping trolley dash to bring in talent.
Former chairman Bleddyn Phillips had written cheques the club couldn’t cash as he looked to establish them in the top flight.
Olly Barkley, Dean Schofield and Lachlan McCaffrey were also brought in to bolster the ranks but things quickly soured and spiralled.
Writing on the wall
By the time they reached their Round 6 fixture against Newcastle Falcons in October, it was already being described as “must-win” if they were to stage an unlikely survival bid.
Up to that point, London Welsh had lost every game so far by an average scoreline of 50-9 - taking hammerings against Exeter Chiefs, Sale Sharks and Harlequins to name a few.
They would lose again by a score of 23-3 at the Kassam, with Weepu given a rude awakening to life in England by a rampaging Kieran Brookes.
With the raft of changes made to the squad in the offseason, it’s safe to say players were struggling to gel on the pitch.
Rugby at its simplest a game of organisation, teamwork and getting your basics right - with London Welsh struggling to get all three right in a torrid campaign.
Much like Marshall, Latham, and even Carl Hayman at Newcastle to an extent, before him, the Kiwi cult hero was beginning to feel the heat.
Signed for his playmaking ability, it was keeping out the points that Welsh struggled with most as they went on to conceded a whopping 1,021 points at an average of 46.4 per game across the season.
Alternating between 9 and 10, Weepu sounded uncertain even back in October 2014 when he told the Daily Express: "It has been pretty difficult at times.
“You would expect the side to gel quickly but it hasn't quite turned out that way.
"There are things that some of the boys are a bit slow on. We're doing a bit more work to try to rectify that and make it happen as quickly as we can.
"Everyone doesn't need to have the perfect game, we just have to make sure we execute our own roles to the best of our ability.
"I expected the Premiership to be challenging and it has been. I guess I have to channel all my experience and help the team as much as I can so we can get the results we want."
February exit and turmoil for London Welsh
If you had told Weepu the bonus point London Welsh picked up during Round 2 - for their four tries in a 53-26 reverse to Bath at the Rec - would be the highlight of the season he may have left earlier than his February exit.
His final game, hauled off at the 60-minute mark in a 48-10 loss to Gloucester at Kingsholm, was the final nail in the coffin as he joined Wasps a week later.
As for London Welsh, they would be the prime example highlighted by Premiership Rugby that ringfencing is a good idea given the enormous step up the jump is from the Championship.
In many ways, it is a minor miracle that Weepu was still playing professional rugby at the time given he suffered a stroke in March 2014.
Speaking to the Independent, he said: “I was with Peter Saili and Charles Piutau and mid-conversation, I couldn’t talk properly. I was talking like a baby.
“I had blurred vision, I was spacing out and couldn’t function…I didn’t know what they were talking about.
“I managed to get home driving, and tried to wait it out so that I could get back to reality, and talk to the doctor.”
Despite the finances involved, it’s not hard to conceive that London Welsh wanted a World Cup winner to join them while Weepu just wanted to keep playing.
It makes it even more of a shame it didn’t work out given Weepu’s cult status as he trotted out for a club wanting to gatecrash the established elite. On paper, it was a match made in heaven.
However, to make matters worse, they were also defeated in every single European Challenge Cup game as well as every Anglo-Welsh cup match.
As a result, they became the first top-flight English side for over 10 years to suffer defeat in every single competitive fixture over a season.
The former All Black would make 14 appearances in the Premiership
Credit: Unknown
The All Black left out the back door to join Wasps while London Welsh fell out the trapdoor a month later, sealing relegation in March after being beaten 29-14 by Bath.
In October 2016, HMRC petitioned the High Court to wind up the club in September 2016 due to unresolved debts.
By January 2017, they were kicked out of the Championship before the club, which began in 1885, ceased to exist.
Thankfully for their fanbase, they are now reestablishing themselves in the London 1 South league as an amateur club.
To paraphrase former Leeds United chairman Peter Risdale on their own clubs sorry demise: “Should we have spent so heavily in the past? Probably not, but we lived the dream, we enjoyed the dream.”
It was a dream many London Welsh fans would hardly have imagined when Weepu joined, but quickly turned into a nightmare as their 2014/15 campaign goes down in infamy.
