Sporting Bygones: Nel’s ‘spider’ tied Rotherham in knots but overwhelmed Titans still found reason to be proud

A relegation is not traditionally a reason to take a stroll down memory lane but in the case of Rotherham Titans and their fall from grace a decade ago, it is one worth remembering.
Mike UmagaMike Umaga
Mike Umaga

Rotherham had fought valiantly to earn a second shot at the Zurich Premiership, defeating opposition on the pitch and in the courtroom.

When they were finally granted another go at mixing it with the elite, no-one could deny they had not earned the right.

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Sadly, however, those that tried to keep them out by strangling them with bureacratic red tape, were proven prescient.

Rotherham were spectacularly out of their depth in the Zurich Premiership of 2003-04.

The statistics make for grim reading. Twenty-two games played, 22 defeats. Ninety tries conceded, 770 points allowed and only three losing bonus points achieved.

Their relegation was as good as confirmed by February.

Yet recollections of that year do not evoke only nightmares.

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Rotherham’s second dalliance with the Harlequins’, Wasps’ and Bristols’ of this world brought plenty of initial pride to the town, and a few moments to savour for those who were involved.

There were moments of great camaraderie on the road as Rotherham belied their league status by reaching the quarter-finals of the Parker Pen Shield, Europe’s second-tier competition.

There was also the chance for young bucks to take their first steps on the road to regular Premiership appointments.

Future England wing David Strettle earned his stripes in the Titans’ chastening season, while players like prop Simon Bunting got to enjoy the fruits of the club’s labour having helped the Titans climb the divisions in the previous decade.

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For homegrown players like Jonathan Pendlebury, the struggles the club endured were only half the story.

The maturing, versatile forward was relishing his education coming in at the deep end of Premiership rugby.

“I remember my first appearance coming off the bench against Saracens at home,” recalls the 30-year-old who went on to play for Gloucester and Leeds Carnegie, for whom he now is an academy coach.

“That was a great moment for me. We played all our home games at Millmoor which I still maintain is one of the best pitches I’ve ever played on.

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“The next week I made my full debut up at Newcastle. They had a helluva backline; Jonny Wilkinson, Dave Walder, Jamie Noon, Michael Stephenson. They beat us something like 45-7.

“For all our losses in the Premiership I remember we had some really good European trips where we really bonded.”

Rotherham began the season with Canadian forward Mike Schmid at the helm, but before the turn of the year, South African Steph Nel, together with Geoff Wappett, had been parachuted in to try and turn the tide.

“They’d call you into their office and there’d be Steph smoking his pipe and Geoff doing exactly the same,” laughs Pendlebury of the two old-school coaches.

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“After a half-hour meeting they’d gone down two pipes each and you came out of the smog of their office feeling awful.”

Mike Umaga, who had quit playing to concentrate on coaching, was tempted out of retirement to try and save Rotherham, and although Pendlebury remembers the Samoan as one of the stars of that doomed campaign, some of the players Nel brought in merely hastened Rotherham’s relegation.

“Steph brought in several overseas players, which left a lot of the guys who had got the club up through the divisions, very upset,” says Pendlebury.

“I was only young so I did what I was told. I was a bit wet behind the ears. I was playing for my home club in the Premiership and in Europe, at the start of my career so it was exciting.

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“But looking back, some of the coaching techniques would have coaches nowadays scratching their heads. We’d do two and half hours in a morning, have a massive lunch, then two and half hours training in the afternoon.

“Because things weren’t going right, they thought the answer was more training and more meetings to get us through it. And we struggled because of it.

“I remember one tactic was the spider, a driving maul where the last man kept coming off the back and crawling round. Any time you see a Rotherham player now, they always remind you of the ‘spider’.

“All in all I was proud to play for Rotherham. I loved it there. Me and Lee Blackett (now the head coach), were living the dream.

“They could have trusted the two of us, and Dave Strettle, a little more when the relegation was confirmed, but I can’t complain about the grounding we got.”