Bears confident more cubs will push through
PAT Lam’s relentlessly bullish policy of raising expectation will inspire Bristol’s homegrown youngsters to fight for first team places, insists senior academy manager Gethin Watts.
A Rugby Paper survey reveals that high-flying Bristol are currently bottom of the pile when it comes to fielding homegrown players in this season’s Premiership, with just one in five of their starting XV over the first seven rounds having come through the club’s academy.
Two stints in the Championship and vigorous recruitment aimed at competing domestically and in Europe explains much of that, but Watts believes a bigger picture is in play that will see many of the club’s promising local youngsters emerge over the next 18 months.
Watts, recruited by Lam from Welsh rugby in 2019, told The Rugby Paper:
“We’re aware our (homegrown) figures are low but Pat is only in his third year as far as the Premiership is concerned and his three long-term pillars of what we’re trying to do are to compete to win the league and Champions Cup, have more England players and field more homegrown players.
“We’re in the third year of a five-year plan and one of the big things we’ve done over the last 18 months is to restructure our academy. Prior to that our U18s programme had won just three games in seven years, but last year we won 60 per cent of our games. Pat’s initiated a new plan that is showing green shoots.”
He added: “We’ve split the academy into two groups, a junior academy for 14-16-year-olds with the aim of unlocking potential, and then a senior group in which my main role is to look at the high-performance. Already we’ve seen George Kloska, James
Dun, Jack Bates, Charlie Powell, Harry Ascherl and Fitz Harding given Premiership chances and it’s now paying off.
“In addition, we’ve got three guys in the England U20s squad – Ben Bamber, Alex Groves and Deago Bailey – and would have had more but for injury. We’re seeing progress and the biggest thing Pat has done is to raise expectations throughout the club so the local boys know they have to be good enough – and I’m confident we’ll see more of them over the next 18 months.”
Watts explained: “The rhetoric here before Pat arrived was about getting into the Premiership and surviving, but what he’s done, and what we’re trying to portray to our young players, is about getting into the Premiership and winning the league and the Champions Cup.
“We’ve got the Semi Radradas and Charles Piutaus and a backbone of some world-class players, but that allows us to raise the expectations of our local players and you’ve seen the way guys like Andy Uren and Joe Joyce have responded to that. We’re getting guys like Harry Randall, Ioan Lloyd and Callum Sheed,
right, into Test rugby and they can see that as well.”
Elsewhere, Chris Boyd’s policy of promoting youth sees Northampton topping the charts, with almost half their Premiership players coming through the ranks, while Exeter’s well-established academy set-up continues to pay dividends. Leicester rank highly, although academy products like George Ford, Calum Green and Ryan Bower have plied their trade elsewhere before returning to the club. Bath’s ambitious plan to have 50 per cent of their players homegrown has some way to go, while London Irish, like Bristol, are still paying the price for two stints in the Championship.