You can win things with kids if they get a chance
“Two clubs which have invested most in their academy structures are in first and second place in the league”
ONE of the biggest falsehoods being peddled in the promotion/relegation debate is the idea that you cannot develop young players in a competition as fiercely contested as the Premiership.
The theory adopted by some club owners and coaches that the top league prohibits the introduction of inexperienced players because they will make a team more relegation-prone is a blatant distortion that does not stand up to scrutiny.
Earlier this season Bristol’s head coach Pat Lam offered this explanation of why he wants to end promotion/relegation: “It’s great for the fans, but I don’t think it’s great for the English game. My views are very clear. Everything is about survival and staying up in this league. Whereas (without relegation) you could get some serious development, you could bring a lot of young guys through.”
I don’t buy that. There is, for example, no evidence that a talented young back is any more likely to make a costly mistake, or a series of them, than a veteran prop who is penalised for persistent scrum collapses because he can no longer carry the load.
How much of a liability, for instance, has Ollie Thorley been for Gloucester since he made his breakthrough into the starting line-up? Thorley was the youngest player to make his debut for Gloucester in the pro era, at 17, and the 22-year-old winger’s electrifying running has made him a box-office attraction at Kingsholm.
There was no sign of Thorley doing anything other than galvanising Gloucester in Friday night’s 24-17 home victory over Exeter, when his uncanny ability to shrug off tackles and make crucial breaks made him a deserved man-of-the-match.
It is an age-old truth in team sports that if successful clubs adopt the principle of evolution over the revolution – as in a judicious blend of old hands, midcareer pros, and young guns – then they have the most competitive and sustainable model there is.
An intrinsic and non-negotiable part of that model is developing your own players, which is what coaching is about. The reality is that a large number of Premiership clubs have neglected their academies over the last decade, taking the lazy, more costly route of trawling the transfer market whenever they are in need of a new player – often from the Southern Hemisphere – to fill a gap in their starting line-up. It is not an accident that two of the clubs which have invested most in their academy structures, Saracens and Exeter, are in first and second place in the league with a significant gap between them and the chasing pack.
Both clubs have a constant flow of young home-grown players into their top squads, with Nick Isiekwe, Ben Earl, Max Malins at Saracens, while Exeter’s Sam and Joe Simmonds, and Jonny Hill are just a few of their examples.
The fallacy that promotion/relegation stops Premiership coaches giving young players match exposure always seems to be at its loudest when there is no certainty over who will drop down to the Championship. England hitting an interplayers, national trough, or Premiership clubs struggling in Europe are other opportunities to trot it out.
Evidence that it is a bogus argument is reinforced by it being undermined when England are on a winning streak, or English clubs are riding high in the European Cup, or if there is one or, at most, two relegation candidates.
When England won the World Cup in 2003, with a 24-year-old Jonny Wilkinson kicking the winning drop-goal, those questioning whether the promotion-relegation system was right for English rugby were few on the ground.
There was, to the contrary, plenty of evidence to support the argument that it was the rigour of a system in which every league match counted that was at the root of England’s success in 2003, and again in getting to the final to defend their title in 2007.
Pro rugby is defined by being a competitive sport which should provide young players with an aspirational career path. Yet, so many Premiership owners and coaches ignore that the ringfenced structure they hanker after has resulted already to many of England’s best young players being pickled in the aspic of training with little or no-match play.
The decision by many clubs to buy-in often from overseas, is significantly to blame. So is the recent narrow-minded Premiership policy which has deliberately curtailed the loan links with Championship clubs, meaning that their young players are denied the chance to play regularly in the second division.
The result is that outside an occasional run off the bench in the Premiership, most of the match play that young English players get is in truncated semicompetitive formats like the new-fangled Premiership Cup and moribund Premiership ‘A’ league. The upshot is that many of them play one match a month if they are lucky.
This limited exposure explains why, despite England having been either junior world champions, or finalists or semi-finalists for the last six years, the conversion rate of players like Thorley making the big breakthrough into senior club rugby, and international level, is not what it should be.
The system that is flawed is not promotion-relegation, but the virtual Premiership ring-fence that exists already. It does not offer enough young English players the opportunity to advance because the regular weekly match-play that is an essential part of their development is denied them.