Ian Lenagan removed Tony Rea as head coach, and moved him "upstairs" to a position on the club's board of directors. In his place, Brian McDermott, an assistant coach at Leeds Rhinos, was appointed as head coach. Results at home improved, taking Harlequins RL to 7th place in Super League XI. The 2007 season saw the team pull off an incredible opening win against St Helens and by 7 July the team was 5th in the table, but a collapse in form in the second half of the season – a recurring theme of the McDermott reign – saw the team win only once from eight matches to finish 9th. At the end of the season, Ian Lenagan took over control of fellow Super League side Wigan Warriors and was given two years to sell his Harlequins shares. In 2008, Harlequins RL got off to a good start, winning six from the first ten games, but as was customary a second half of the season collapse saw the club won only five from the last seventeen games to finish in 9th again. In 2009, the club was playing very well in the early part of the season, which extended up until 12 June with ten wins from sixteen, but yet again the rest of the season proved miserable with one win from 12 seeing the club slide from 5th position to 11th. Home supporters were particularly displeased with the 0–48 home loss to Castleford and the 0–36 half time score v Bradford. By round 12 in 2010, the club had won only one game from the first eleven and were bottom of the table, meaning that McDermott had seen the team win just twice in twenty three games, and at half-time away at Wigan the team were losing 24–6 before pulling off their finest comeback as Harlequins RL to win 38–26. That result seemed to spur the team into life briefly, with three more wins from the next four, but after that there was an end-of-season collapse to join the start-of-season collapse. The round 25 game at Catalan saw the Quins bottom of the table with Catalan on a similar points tally and the game looked likely to decide who would finish bottom. The Quins were winning 16–12 with just a couple of minutes to go when Catalan were over the line with ball in hand, but Will Sharp stripped