The damning report on schools rugby released by the Rugby Football Union this week leaves little open to interpretation. The verdict is unequivocal, the warning stark: act now or the sport will drift into irrelevance. Whatever you think about the non-contact or reduced contact initiatives aimed at tackling the issue, at least the RFU has admitted it has a problem.
It is a societal problem as much as anything else. Parents are being turned off rugby in a more risk-averse atmosphere where football is king. Rugby is complicated, seen as dangerous, it can be perceived as a sport for “posh white boys”, according to the report, and is a foreign concept in most state schools.
Meanwhile, England are thriving at age-grade level. It is that juxtaposition that the RFU must wrestle with – and in truth it spends most of its time wrestling with it. How to marry the professional side of the game with the amateur or grassroots. This can be seen in its archaic governance and in the hand-wringing on both sides whenever the union encounters financial difficulty.
You might think the RFU would throw considerably more than the £5m it is reportedly committing to solve the schools issue should the age-grade teams start to falter, but not so long ago the pathway itself was a mess. The development department was full of empty desks. It is to the union’s credit, then, that decline was arrested and culminated in a first Junior World Cup triumph in eight years over the summer under the stewardship of Mark Mapletoft. On the back of a junior Six Nations title, too.
The challenge is to prevent those players from withering on the vine; that they are given opportunities to develop with game time at their Premiership clubs. It is ironic that while school participation is in damaging decline, successful age-grade players graduate to senior level only to reach a bottleneck. The early signs of this season, however, offer some promise.
Afo Fasogbon is arguably the most high-profile Under-20s graduate, in no small part thanks to the manner in which he waved Ellis Genge off the pitch last month, but fellow front-rower Asher Opoku-Fordjour, the scrum-half Archie McParland, Henry Pollock, Ben Redshaw and Nathan Michelow have all appeared in the Premiership this season. Maybe it is a sign that the Professional Game Partnership is working, perhaps just a consequence of smaller squads in a smaller league, but progress is being made.
“What England can’t control is the direction of travel that the clubs want to go in,” says Mapletoft. “Fin Smith goes to Northampton and he gets the opportunity with Dan Biggar moving on to Toulon, but good luck to anyone who is behind Finn Russell at Bath. Sometimes it comes down to opportunity but most coaches do believe that top players will find a way.
“There’s definitely a lot more momentum behind [the pathway] and we’re starting to see the fruits of it. The most important thing is to maintain that when you’re not going to have the top calibre of players year in, year out. It’s just not how the system works. That’s the dream but the reality is that you’re going to have some good years, some average years, but as long as there’s a general conveyor belt then the pathway is doing its job.”
What about the less fortunate? Mapletoft points out that different players take varying amounts of time to emerge into the senior game and urges patience. Crucially, he also cites the role he has in continuing existing relationships with his graduates, revealing he is still in regular contact with Henry Arundell, who remains unavailable for England while at Racing 92. “There are a lot of players who have to bide their time but the crucial bit is keeping that connection,” adds Mapletoft. “The 20s coaches, the pathways coaches clearly know those players better than most, so we still keep those conversations going.”
Here is where the return of England A comes in. Last season’s 91-5 victory over Portugal was not the sort of contest young players benefit from but it was a start – the first fixture of its kind 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.
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“It’s incredible how far [the A team] fell but it’s such a crucial part of the development programme,” says Mapletoft, who recalls playing in a Five Nations grand slam fixture against Wales when A teams had their own secondary competition.
“Not only for those players who are on the fringes of the seniors and Steve Borthwick wants to have a look at but also for the pathway lads progressing up who need to keep that connection with England who might not be ready for the international stage.”
It says much about Borthwick’s commitment to continuity that there is perhaps more intrigue around the makeup of next month’s A squad than the seniors. While Eddie Jones may have taken the opportunity to pick a few youngsters and bestow an apprentice asterisk on them, maybe cast off one or two more established players on the dubious grounds of complacency, Borthwick is not the type to shuffle his pack just to keep everyone on their toes.
The upshot is there were no surprises in his squad for the coming autumn Tests. That, in turn, means the players who have starred in the opening rounds of the Premiership, eager to catch Borthwick’s eye, remain on the outside. But for that group – think Bath’s back-rower Guy Pepper, Saracens’ Tobias Elliott, Fasogbon and Opoku-Fordjour – the return of the England A side may offer a platform.
“It primarily shows there’s a real alignment piece, out of the Under‑20s, into the As, on to the seniors, but also recognising that each of those teams have very different objectives,” says Mapletoft. “International rugby is about winning, end of conversation. The pathway isn’t quite the same, great if you do [win], well done over the summer, that was brilliant – but actually it’s the quality of the players that come out of that camp … and the alignment they create with the seniors that is ultimately key. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
