Wray surveys the reality of Saracens' grand dream

One point will probably be enough – one measly, miserable little point at Newcastle tomorrow afternoon. Six seasons ago, Saracens contributed fully to a classic encounter at the self-same Kingston Park venue and might, with the grace of God and a following wind, have pinched both the game and the Premiership title from under the noses of Rob Andrew's pioneering professionals. This weekend, the self-styled "Manchester United of rugby" resemble nothing more captivating than a down-at-heel Bolton Wanderers as they cling for dear life to their élite status. Depressing. Very depressing.

It could easily have been worse, of course: Saracens were very nearly beaten by Bristol on Tuesday night – a calamity that would have left their fez-wearing supporters wondering whether Tommy Cooper himself had risen from the grave and taken up a seat on the board. But they sneaked home by the most microscopic of margins and put precious space between themselves and London Irish, the bottom club. If Leicester shut out Irish at Welford Road today, a scenario that does not demand any great suspension of disbelief, a bonus point on Tyneside will guarantee Nigel Wray's team Premiership rugby next term.

Yet there is no disguising the fact that the Saracens project has failed. It was a grand project, to be sure; maybe the grandest ever witnessed in the English club game. Wray, not quite a sporting Onassis but as rich as Croesus by rugby standards, was the ultimate fan with a chequebook, and he used that chequebook to transform a club forever oscillating between hard-up and skint into an all-new, state-of-the-art, top-flight outfit with a team-sheet to match. Lynagh, Sella, Bracken, Pienaar, Benazzi, Horan, Castaignède... you name them, they materialised in north London. Some of them are still there, flogging themselves around the training paddocks of Southgate, but the sense of magic evaporated many months ago.

So what happened? How did a club so brilliantly managed and marketed that a whole new rugby audience came out of the footballing streets of Watford to watch them, fritter away Wray's millions – some say £12m, others £15m – on nothing much? The owner himself admits to delusions of grandeur. "I thought that by bringing the Lynaghs and Sellas here, I could count on 15,000 people coming straight through the turnstiles to see them play," he admitted after the Bristol match. "I was wrong. What I didn't understand was the profundity of the task I was taking on. There was no real culture of spectator rugby in London: Harlequins sometimes pulled in a few, but at Wasps and London Irish and Saracens there had never been any crowds to speak of. It wasn't a question of economics, but a question of culture."

As Wray was in mid-flow, Horan emerged from the dressing room, stopped to listen and immediately picked up on the culture argument. "The thing I can't get my head around is the way the English watch their sport," he said. "Everyone is looking to see who is going down, rather than looking up at the top of the table and wondering who might knock Gloucester off their perch. I've never known anything like it. Coming from Australia, I get excited about winners rather than losers. You guys are weird."

Unwittingly at first, but quite deliberately in latter seasons, Wray has attempted to dismantle that culture, to change the way the English rugby public indulge their passion. He has always been anti-relegation, not simply because he wishes to protect his investment but because he genuinely believes it is impossible to nurture a fledgling professional game in a fragile commercial environment while operating within the straitjacket of a 12-month lease. "On this issue, we should have had our big fight with the Rugby Football Union years ago," he said. "Sir John Hall [the businessman who revolutionised club rugby by professionalising the Newcastle club] was dead right about that."

In one practical sense, though, Wray and his advisers got it dead wrong. Seduced by the almost instant success of their ground-breaking move to Watford and their victory in the 1998 cup final, they lost sight of the fundamentals that had made Saracens such a strong, spirited, hugely likeable club – a club with a heartbeat – in the first place. They tried to build from the top down, rather than the bottom up, by investing in name players, some of them distinctly elderly and others past caring. They lost the best of themselves, and they are paying through the nose for their folly.

This is not to criticise the contribution of the original international imports. Michael Lynagh was a truly exceptional goal-kicking outside-half and a tactical genius; Philippe Sella an earthy, no-frills competitor who understood the unique dynamics of European club rugby, having spent the best part of a sporting lifetime at Agen earning the undying respect of the local cognoscenti. Francois Pienaar was a capture, too. Brave as a lion and more committed than a fighting dog, he was as natural an on-field leader as the union game produced in the closing decade of the last century.

But Pienaar wanted more, much more. He wanted to run the whole show and convinced Wray of his ability to do it. And when the owner gave him carte blanche, the foundations began to crumble. Career Saracens upped sticks and left – top-notch talents like Mark Evans and Tony Diprose, willing worker-ants like George Chuter and Steve Ravenscroft. Kyran Bracken, a player of the very highest integrity, packed in the captaincy because he found Pienaar's personality cult impossible to handle. The atmosphere in the dressing-room deteriorated so sharply that the front-line internationals jumped ship. Dan Luger and Julian White did not disappear through the out-door within weeks of each other, but within minutes. Danny Grewcock was not far behind them.

And when Pienaar hopped it midway through last season, Wray plumped for another "personality" – Wayne Shelford, the great All Black bear from Auckland's north shore who terrified the living daylights out of people during a playing career of considerable majesty, but never quite persuaded the notoriously hard-headed New Zealand rugby hierarchy of his qualities as a coach. Shelford has not cut it, any more than Pienaar did. Both men thought they could win Premiership matches through force of character, only to be rudely disabused of the notion by opponents who could not have cared less about their World Cup-winning credentials.

When it comes to talent, Saracens might legitimately point to a successful record of growing their own: Diprose and Richard Hill in the mid-1990s, David Flatman and Ben Johnston in the late '90s, Stuart Hooper and Richard Haughton in recent months. But the quick-fix, hot-shot mentality has betrayed them here, too. Evans, probably the most gifted rugby administrator of his generation but nobody's idea of a household name, turned out bright young things by the dozen, and was marginalised for his trouble. When he could take no more, this Saracens diehard stomped off to Harlequins, who promptly reached a domestic cup final, won the European Shield and qualified for the Heineken Cup.

Sarries will probably see through this first serious threat to top-echelon survival since 1996, the year of Wray's takeover, but the outlook is bleak indeed. Flatman has signed for Bath, Hooper for Leeds – two of best young tight forwards in England, lovingly developed by Saracens, have had enough. Tom Shanklin, another graduate of the Southgate academy, has been offered a small fortune by Cardiff; Johnston has been linked with Quins. Horan and Benazzi are teetering on the brink of the past tense, the front row is in dire need of reconstruction work. The only news is bad news, and the supporters are picking up on the negativity. Fewer than 6,000 of them turned up for this week's relegation scrap under the Vicarage Road floodlights.

This summer, the lights could go out on the current coaching regime – "Is Wayne the right man to take us forward? I honestly don't know," Wray said darkly last weekend – but if not Shelford, who? There would be no shortage of applicants, for rugby is almost suffocating under the weight of recently retired players looking for salaried positions, but any new guy would find what the old guy found: a soufflé of a team, all froth and very little substance; a club with no record of continuity and, by logical extension, no sense of identity. "We ship players in and we ship them back out again," Bracken said recently. If Wray is not extremely careful, he will ship his first sporting love out of existence.