Play-off win welcome end to unique season - Vaughan

Worcester Warriors winning the Champ on their return to professional rugby is an "unexpected and welcome" end to a "really unique season", says the club's chief executive Stephen Vaughan.

The former Premiership club completed their fairy tale comeback, after nearly three years of fighting to survive following financial collapse in 2022, by beating Bedford in the play-off final last Sunday.

That win followed an extraordinary last-play victory over runaway league leaders Ealing, who had won all 26 regular-season matches, in the semi-final and a quarter-final victory against Chinnor.

All that came after Worcester finished fourth in the Champ table, 10 points behind second-placed Bedford and 40 adrift of Ealing.

"Personally, I was targeting a home semi-final, which we never got. We got a home quarter-final, obviously an away semi-final and an away final," Vaughan told BBC Hereford and Worcester.

"But did I think we'd be sitting here with teams like Ealing and Bedford and Coventry and others that have been around the Champ a lot more than we have? No I didn't.

"I thought top four, competitive, would be brilliant in year one, you get the community back, get supporters back, launch an academy and then really settle our footprint back into the county.

"But this is a really unexpected and very welcome kind of addition to what has been a really unique season."

Having been hammered in their final league game by Coventry 64-28 to end the regular season with a fourth defeat in a row, Vaughan said there had to be a mind shift ahead of their involvement in the play-offs.

"Coventry were brilliant. Interestingly, come Monday after the game the language changed quite dramatically within the group," he said.

"One of the things that we did was when we put the squad up for the Chinnor game instead of number one for the loose-head prop, number two for the hooker, we put a number next to them of how many trophy wins that they'd had in their careers and reminded them how many winners we had in the room.

"Whether that be Lloyd Williams, who'd won the Six Nations, all the way through to guys that had won local competitions and we changed the environment and culture quite dramatically

"Nobody was expecting us to go to Ealing and get a win and most people weren't expecting us to go to Bedford and get a win. But if you look at those performances, especially the final, they were probably as close to a Premiership-style performance I've seen."

Vaughan, a former CEO at Wasps, has been at Sixways since current owner Chris Holland assumed control in September 2023 and helped oversee the rebuilding of the club from scratch under head coach Matt Everard for their return to rugby last autumn.

Vaughan, who knew Everard from their time together at Wasps, where the latter was a coach, said the Warriors boss was someone they could "trust" to handle such a big project.

"This is a guy that's going to buy into a long-term plan here. He's pulled together a group of people, coaches, medical analysts who are very good.

"Matt is the kind of guy, when you're setting up a new organisation, we knew that we could trust him - he's a great human being and is respected by people across the game."

After close to 40 players were brought in last summer, Vaughan said expectations were realistic.

"We never set any physical targets to the playing group because we felt it was a bit odd to do that when we hadn't played together, we didn't know how things going to work," he said.

"When we were recruiting players the only pool we could fish in was one that where players weren't already contracted somewhere else. They were all free agents. Being competitive was key.

"We're learning all the time, we know we've got to improve in lots of areas, on and off the pitch, and we will. We hope to again be very competitive next season and make those play-offs."