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Alan Dickens: accepting Newcastle offer was "a no-brainer"
By Jon Newcombe
Alan Dickens will resume his Premiership career at Newcastle, having been appointed as senior coach of the Falcons.
The former scrum-half was placed on leave by Leicester Tigers last October and wasn't seen in his role as attack coach at Mattioli Woods Welford Road for the remainder of the 2023/24 season.
Prior to his role at Leicester, Dickens was head coach of England Under-20s, holding the position for four years.
Most notably, Dickens spent over a decade as part of the coaching team at Northampton Saints, including roles within the club’s academy programme, attack and defence.
For a brief period, he served as interim head coach of the Saints when the club sacked Newcastle consultant Director of Rugby Steve Diamond's good friend, Jim Mallinder.
The 48-year-old also enjoyed a distinguished career as a professional player, featuring for Sale Sharks, Leeds Carnegie, Saracens and Northampton Saints.
Speaking on the latest addition to his coaching team and his former colleague, director of rugby Steve Diamond said: “I’m delighted to welcome Alan to Newcastle Falcons.
“His extensive experience in both playing and coaching in the Premiership will be invaluable as we strive to compete at the highest level.
“Alan embodies the mentality we are instilling throughout the club, from the coaching staff to the players, and more importantly, understands the challenge that lies ahead.
“His commitment to hard work will be crucial in helping us achieve our goal of becoming a highly respected Premiership team.”
Relishing his move to Tyneside and a link-up with Diamond once more, Knowsley-born Dickens said: “I've known Steve since around 2001 when I first became a professional rugby player, and since then we’ve had a handful of opportunities to work together.
“He’s somebody that I hold in high regard, and when he approached me for the position it was a no-brainer. It’s certainly an exciting time for the club.
“I’ll be taking on the role of a senior coach at the Falcons, overseeing both attack and defence.
“I know there’s a strong group of coaches at the club who are very loyal, such as Micky Ward, Mark Laycock and James Ponton, who are local people to the club, and then there’s Tom Williams, an enthusiastic young coach. So it’ll be great to get settled in and work with them for the new season.”
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Latest Comments
Yeah I actually think it was Havili that took it off him. Not bad himself, but on the advice of Razor, who didn't even pursue it and use Havili on a split bench as 10 cover?
One huge cluster#$@% but I think you could be right, I liked O'Connor when he won at the Reds and I've just got a funny feeling he's going to dominate Super Rugby, kinda like how Cooper came back to the Wallabies as an experienced head and spat out South Africa. I think James could do the same with the Blues and other Aus sides. I'd really love Rivez to get a lot of minutes though.
Go to commentsI rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.
He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.
The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).
The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.
The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).
It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.
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