Dean Richards
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- This article is about the rugby player. For other football player, see Dean Richards (footballer).
Dean Richards (born 11th July 1963), affectionately known as "Deano" is a former England rugby union player.
He was schooled at John Cleveland College, in Hinkley and played for Rouen in France for a year before coming to play for the Tigers.
A big bear of a player he was one of the top number eights in the world, winning 48 England caps. He captained the Tigers for four seasons in the early 90's. During his playing career he won the league twice and the cup three times. He played in the 1987, 1991 and 1995 world cups. He led Leicester to their first Heineken Cup final against Brive, in the Old Arms Park, which they lost.
He was dropped in favour of Irish back row forward Eric Miller, by Bob Dwyer, and is thought to be one of the contributing factors in Dwyer's sacking as coach of Tigers.
Deano then took over and in his first full season as Director of Rugby won the Allied Dunbar Premeirship, the third time in club history. The Tigers successfully defended the title for four years in a row under him. However his crowning glory as a coach has to be the back-to-back Heineken Cups that Tigers won, defeating Stade Francais in the Parc des Princes 34-30 and beating Munster 15-9 in Cardiff's Millennium Stadium.
But after two trophyless seasons and a failure to get out of the pool in Europe Dean was sacked in 2004. This ended a twenty year association with the club. His former back-row team-mate and assistant coach John Wells was chosen as his succseor. Dean was deeply unhappy about this and asked the club for all his memorabilia back and for the club to rename the bar which was named after him. He was later appointed coach at French club Grenoble [1] (http://www.planet-rugby.com/News/story_36936.shtml), this started out well but whilst fighting relegation he suffered a players' revolt on the way to play Toulouse away.
External link
- sporting-heroes.net - Dean Richards (http://www.sporting-heroes.net/rugby-heroes/displayhero.asp?HeroID=1401).