Danny Care embracing Paul Gustard's fresh approach at Harlequins after 'embarrassing' slump last season

Harlequins’ collapse last season that led to director of rugby John Kingston being sacked left the players “embarrassed”, England scrum-half Danny Care has admitted.

The turn of the year brought a disastrous slump in form as Quins recorded just two wins in their final 10 Premiership matches, dropping them to 10th in the table and only ahead of Worcester Warriors on points difference. That led to the unsurprising dismissal of long-serving boss Kingston and the appointment of then-England defence coach Gustard, who has performed an unexpected U-turn against taking his country to next year’s Rugby World Cup in order to take his first role as a head coach.

It’s a shake-up that Care’s teammate Joe Marler admitted needed to happen at the club in order to reverse the unwelcome slump, while Gustard already has a relationship through the national team with the likes of Care, Marler, Chris Robshaw and Mike Brown, the new man in charge is wasting little time to implement his own ideas that weren’t as prominent as when he worked under Eddie Jones.

“Obviously it’s a new era, new ideas, new identity,” Care said. “Last year, we all know how embarrassing it was by the end of it. So we’re really looking forward to getting going and we’ll see what happens. We’ve had a lot of fun in pre-season and now we’re really looking forward to our first game, at home against Sale. We want to give the Stoop something to cheer about and hopefully turn that back into a bit of a fortress again.

“Guzzie [Gustard] has energy in abundance and all he wants to do is win. He hates losing. His pre-requisite this year for a team he is involved with is that we are the hardest-working team in the Premiership. The hardest-working team normally wins the league at the end of the season and we haven’t set specific goals, but that is the ultimate goal; to be the best team in the league.

“We will try to win as many games as we can and see where we’re at. We’ll work hard, have some fun as well and try to win some games.

“It definitely hurt. It’s my 13th year at the club, I love the club and to be down where we were and losing games where we were, it’s something I’ve never really experienced there before. It is something that we were embarrassed about and it was hard to put your finger on what it was. The club has made the decision to bring in new voices and go in a new direction and I do feel that it was needed.

“We needed some new voices. The coaches who were here before had done a brilliant job but we’ve got the right people in place now, they’re pushing us forward and we’re going in the right direction as a club now. As players, we’ve got to take a lot of responsibility – we owe the club some good performances this year.”

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Care talks a good game, but the only proof that change has fully come about will come in Harlequins’ results. If the performances return to the standard expected at the Twickenham Stoop and the victories come with them, spirits will very much be on the rise for the 2012 Premiership champions.

But that could also help Care return to the other Twickenham stadium this season. The 31-year-old was one of the notable omissions from the England squad that toured South Africa in the summer, and he remained absent when Jones named his pre-season training squad that convened in south-west London earlier this month.

For England’s most-capped scrum-half, this sudden cull came as a shock, even if Jones said that Care was one of those players being “rested”, but he has since accepted the thinking behind the head coach’s decisions and hopes that a summer doing just that will help him rediscover the form for Quins that made him such a threat on the international stage not so long ago.

“At the time, when I met with Eddie and he said the best thing for me was a rest and the summer off, I probably couldn’t see the bigger picture because I’m desperate to play for England and I didn’t want to miss a game,” adds Care. “I definitely didn’t want to miss a tour and the chance to go and win a series in South Africa.

“But looking back at it now, he knows what he’s talking about I think. I definitely feel in the best shape I’ve been in, mentally and physically, at the start of a season. It was great to have some down-time with my family and then spend a proper pre-season with the boys from day one.

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“I watched the games [in South Africa] and it is hard to watch. I had to watch them on my own – I can’t have my wife sat there with me! It was tough to see the first couple of Tests. The lads started so well and in the first Test, after the first 20 minutes or so I was thinking, ‘This is going to be a really bad one to miss; it’s going to be a 40 or 50-pointer’.

“But people underestimate how good South Africa are and how tough it is to go down there and get wins. It was great to see the boys come back and get a win at the end, and hopefully that will give us some momentum going into the autumn.”

With England’s first match against the All Blacks in four years scheduled for November, Care will hope that the prospect of a recall becomes a reality. But first, he and his club teammates must address their Harlequins form, and that’s going to take a whole lot more than hope alone.