Spittle: Late developers may be lost to the game
NOTTINGHAM’s history-making winger Jack Spittle fears more late bloomers like himself may be potentially lost to the professional game because of Championship funding cuts.
Spittle, 25, went down the university route instead of through a Premiership academy system and his first proper taste of senior rugby before going full-time came at National 2 North Leicester Lions while still a student at Nottingham Trent.
Now in his third season as a contracted professional, Spittle has come into his own and on January 31 became first Nottingham player to score five tries in a league match – one of them a length-of-the-field try of the season contender – in the Green & Whites’ 6210 rout of Yorkshire Carnegie.
“People develop at different times – some lads virtually had a beard by the time they were ten whereas I matured much later,” he told The Rugby Paper.
“I did pretty well with my school (Northampton
School for Boys), we got to the national finals, but I never really pushed on.
“I didn’t go through an academy and never thought I’d be a professional rugby player. There are a lot of people who fall through the cracks that are good enough to play professional rugby.
“If more clubs go parttime and the competitiveness is taken out of the Championship, will a player develop as much as he would when the league was mainly fulltime? I’m not sure.
“Also, Premiership clubs might stop looking at the Championship as a place to recruit players from. I think it will have a negative ripple effect.”
Spittle added: “I think these funding cuts will apply to a lot of people like me. I’ve got friends at Nottingham who could be laid off. One has a kid with another on the way and another has literally just committed to a mortgage.
“It makes you think, are they (the RFU) taking these people’s lives into account in all of this? It’s not just the players, it’s the staff and coaches as well.”
While Spittle feels some players will decide full-time professional rugby isn’t for them anymore, he hopes to carry on.
He said: “I’ve only just turned 25 and I’d like to think I’ve had a pretty good season so far, and there’s still a lot of the season left.
“I think I am moving in the right direction to become a better player and wouldn’t want to leave the Championship straight away. But if it came down to it, and I couldn’t get a contract, I’d have to drop down to National One and get a job aligned to my degree in construction management.
“I’m not in a really bad position because I do have that degree to fall back on, but others aren’t in the same situation.
“Nottingham have been really good in keeping us up to date, and I suppose I have just got to take it as it comes.”
Spittle’s exploits have helped Nottingham into the top half of the Championship table, no mean feat for a club with one of the smaller budgets in the league.
“I think we’ve won four on the bounce now, and we put up a pretty decent effort against Newcastle before that, losing 19-12. We’re on a decent run.”