Enemies of academies get their facts wrong
Midway through the savagely funny second season of Jesse Anderson’s media big-shot drama Succession, one of the principal characters is talking to a mature student who has spent years working on his second PhD at an Ivy League university. “Just think,” she says. “When you’re done, you won’t have to waste the 12 seconds it takes to look up something on Wikipedia.”
Which leads us, in a roundabout kind of way, to the state of English professional rugby’s oft-criticised academy system and the perils of believing everything you read.
You can find plenty about academies on the internet, once you fight your way past the tweets of Piers Morgan and the pictures of Katie Price, but only a proper QAnon type would give serious consideration to the idea that Exeter, the reigning double champions, are at the wrong end of the league table when it comes to fast-tracking their locally-developed talent.
Yet if you run a lazy eye over the Premiership “ins and outs” pages on the aforementioned Wikipedia, it is possible to reach a very odd conclusion: namely, that while Gloucester have promoted more than 20 academy graduates to their senior squad over the over the last six seasons, their fellow West Countrymen have been just a little more conservative, to the point of promoting none at all.
Which is, of course, a load of oval balls. The presence of Stu Townsend in Exeter’s current Champions Cup squad, together with a couple of Maunders in Jack and Sam, proves they have elevated three players in the scrum-half position alone.
Unlike a majority of top-flight sides, the Chiefs do not make a formal “promoted from the academy” declaration in announcing their squad at the start of each campaign.
As a spokesman for the club this week put it: “We feed players into the senior group as and when they’re considered ready and circumstances dictate. If you look at the detailed picture, our academy record speaks for itself.”
The journalist Alex Shaw has performed a valuable service by drilling down into that detail. In terms of raw numbers ahead of the 2018-19 season, he placed Exeter towards the top of an academy productivity list headed by Saracens, Sale and Harlequins. At the bottom were Bristol – understandable, given that they had just been promoted and were still being widely dismissed as a yo-yo club – and Wasps.
But even the most serious research can be shrouded in mist. Wasps academies down the years have generally been thinly populated: back in the day, the brilliant talent-developer Rob Smith preferred to concentrate his efforts on eight or nine stellar prospects. Even now, there are only 14 players in the senior academy.
Putting it another way, they are one
“The governing class see everything through the prism of the England team”
short of a team.
Academies tend to attract the harshest criticism, not least from those members of the governing class who see everything through the prism of the England team, when the volume of graduates forcing their way into Premiership squads is set against a flow of southern hemisphere imports that shows no sign of drying up.
Leicester may have pushed Jordan Olowofela, Freddie Steward and a dozen others into rugby’s public square since the 2015 World Cup, but they have also flown in (or signed from rival clubs) around 40 South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, Pacific islanders and Argentines. That imbalance is uncomfortable, to say the least.
This column recently highlighted the scale of the exodus from Springlisters bok country and the potential damage it is likely to inflict on the fabric of the world champions’ domestic game.
Since when, Bath have signed an outside-half and a hooker from – you guessed it – South Africa, and are widely reported to be on the trail of the Western Province No. 8 Jaco Coetzee as replacement for the Francebound Zach Mercer, one of the more gifted players ever to emerge from the Recreation Ground academy. As good looks go, this is a bad one. Especially as Mercer is still five months shy of his 24th birthday.
Even so, the emergence of Mercer and his peer group represents an upturn in the fortunes of the Bath academy, which was guilty of underachievement for far too long.
If you look at the club’s team photograph before the 1990 Pilkington Cup final, when they stuck 48 points on Gloucester and made them look like stone-age primitives in the process, eight of the players – from England Asuch as Jeremy Guscott and Andy Robinson to strictly local heroes like Jon Bamsey and Kevin Withey – drew their first breaths in Somerset. A ninth, the majestic flanker John Hall, would have been there with them, but for injury.
It is widely assumed, not least by arch-traditionalists in the county itself, that those days disappeared with amateurism.
The falseness of that assumption is exposed by the fact that the Recreation Grounders could currently field a quintet of Bath-born players of the fully-fledged Premiership variety in Tom de Glanville, Gabriel HamerWebb, Tom Dunn, Tom Ellis and Miles Reid.
The truth of it is that academies work pretty well. That they don’t work all the time or all at once – being prey to a wide range of variables, they wax and wane at different moments – does not make them ripe for the knacker’s yard.