by The damning report on schools rugby published this week by the Rugby Football Union leaves little room for interpretation. The verdict is unequivocal, the warning is clear: act now or sport will become useless. Whatever you think of the no-contact or reduced-contact initiatives aimed at solving this problem, at least the RFU has admitted it has a problem.
It’s a social problem as much as anything else. Parents are turning away from rugby in an atmosphere more reluctant to take risks and where football is king. Rugby is complicated, considered dangerous, it can be seen as a sport for “posh white boys,” according to the report, and it’s a foreign concept in most public schools.
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Meanwhile, England are thriving age-wise. It is this juxtaposition that the RFU must struggle with – and in truth, it spends most of its time struggling against it. How to marry the professional side of the game with the amateur or amateur side. This is seen in its archaic governance and in the tensions on both sides whenever the union encounters financial difficulties.
You would think the RFU would invest a lot more than the £5m it has committed to solving the schools problem if the age teams started to falter, but it wasn’t that long ago that the course he himself was a mess. The development department was full of empty desks. It is therefore to the union’s credit that the decline was halted and culminated in a first Junior World Cup triumph in eight years over the summer under Mark Mapletoft. On the back of a Six Nations junior title too.
The challenge is to prevent these actors from withering on the vine; that they have the opportunity to develop with playing time at their Premiership clubs. It is ironic that while school attendance is in detrimental decline, successful players of a certain age graduate to senior level only to hit a bottleneck. The first signs of this season, however, are promising.
Afo Fasogbon is arguably the most high-profile Under-20 graduate, largely thanks to the way he took Ellis Genge off the field last month, but fellow scrum-half Archie Asher Opoku-Fordjour McParland, Henry Pollock, Ben Redshaw and Nathan Michelow have all appeared in the Premiership this season. Perhaps this is a sign that the Professional Game Partnership is working, perhaps simply a consequence of having smaller teams in a smaller league, but progress is being made.
“What England can’t control is the direction in which clubs want to go,” explains Mapletoft. “Fin Smith is heading to Northampton and he has the opportunity with Dan Biggar moving to Toulon, but good luck to everyone behind Finn Russell at Bath. Sometimes it comes down to opportunity, but most coaches believe the best players will find a solution.
“There’s definitely a lot more momentum behind [the pathway] and we are starting to see the fruits of it. The most important thing is to maintain that when you won’t have high caliber players year after year. That’s just not how the system works. That’s the dream, but the reality is you’re going to have good years, average years, but as long as there’s a general treadmill, the track will do its job.
And the less fortunate? Mapletoft points out that different players take varying degrees of time to emerge in the senior game and urges patience. Crucially, he also cites the role he plays in maintaining existing relationships with his graduates, revealing that he is still in regular contact with Henry Arundell, who remains unavailable for England during his time at Racing 92 “There are a lot of players who have to bide their time, but the main thing is to maintain that connection,” adds Mapletoft. “The 20s coaches, the course coaches clearly know these players better than most, so we do. let’s continue these conversations.”
This is where England A’s comeback comes in. Last season’s 91-5 win over Portugal wasn’t the kind of competition young players enjoy, but it was a start – the first match of this type in eight years. There is another, against Australia A next month, while matches against Ireland and New Zealand are also on the cards next year.
“It’s incredible how far [the A team] fell, but it’s a crucial part of the development programme,” says Mapletoft, who remembers playing in a Five Nations Grand Slam match against Wales when the A teams had their own secondary competition.
“Not only for the players who are on the fringes of the seniors and Steve Borthwick wants to have a look at that, but also for the guys who are progressing and who need to keep that link with England which maybe isn’t not ready for the international stage.”
The fact that there is perhaps more intrigue surrounding the make-up of next month’s A team than the seniors speaks volumes about Borthwick’s commitment to continuity. While Eddie Jones may have taken the opportunity to select a few youngsters and give them an apprentice asterisk, perhaps getting rid of one or two more established players for dubious reasons of convenience, Borthwick does not isn’t the type to mix up his pack just to keep everyone. on their toes.
The result is that there were no surprises in his team for the upcoming fall tests. It means players who shone in the early rounds of the Premiership, keen to catch Borthwick’s eye, remain on the outside looking in. But for this group – think Bath flanker Guy Pepper, Saracens’ Tobias Elliott, Fasogbon and Opoku-Fordjour – the return of the England A team could provide a platform.
“Above all, it shows that there is a real alignment, from the under-20s to the A’s to the seniors, but it also recognizes that each of these teams has very different objectives,” explains Mapletoft. “International rugby is about winning, end of conversation. The path isn’t quite the same, great if that’s the case [win]well done this summer, it was great – but really it’s the quality of players coming out of this camp… and the alignment they create with the seniors that is ultimately the key. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
