England Under 18s

After once ruling the age-grade roost, taps on shoulders, key departures, and criticism from all angles, has meant England’s pathway has come under fire. But now, England’s youth might finally be coming of age.

John Fletcher and Peter Walton had been the coaching dream team behind the England under-18s programme for over a decade. They seemed to have the formula for bringing through next generations, often golden: Owen Farrell, Manu Tuilagi, George Ford, Mako Vunipola, Maro Itoje among their alumni.

And then, in 2018, they were gone, released from international duty by Dean Ryan, appointed as head of international player development two years previous. 

The axe had already swung for Martin Haag, his departure in 2016 coming just four months after coaching England to the Junior World Championship title. Fletcher and Walton were said to have been told of their fate after a tap on the shoulder in the middle of a dinner at Twickenham. 

The information that trickled out suggested fundamental philosophical differences on development and a disconnect between the under-18s and the pathway above it as reasons for their dismissal. In fairness to Ryan, he was faced with a difficult situation as the RFU was having to make financial cuts, leaving him with much depleted resources.

And yet, from the outside, the move seemed fundamentally at odds with the interests of England, given the pathway system had been producing top-performing age group sides for a decade. 

Since the inception of the U20 World Championships in 2008, England had won on three occasions, in 2013, 2014 and 2016, and missed the final just twice up until 2019. It was a crop of young players that would go on to take the senior team to the World Cup final in Yokohama in 2019; of the 31 players selected in England’s Rugby World Cup squad, 25 had played for the under-20s and 24 for the under-18s. 

Root-and-branch reforms led to a drop in performance, and, in the 2019 World Championship, England slipped from runner-up the year before to fifth. Two Covid-cancelled tournaments later, England finished fourth in 2023.

Financial constraints at the RFU had also seen the pathway coaching team reduce from seven full-time staff to just two in the three years of Ryan’s tenure. Jim Mallinder, formerly of Northampton Saints, and Steve Bates, who’d previously coached at Newcastle and with the England Saxons, were the only full-time staff, coaching the under-18s and 20s, with part-time coaches coming in and out of the system from the academies.

When Ryan left to join the Dragons in 2019, he did so claiming that pathway’s funding had disintegrated around him and that the RFU did a thousand things, but none very well. His departure was just the first of many; by August, Mallinder and Bates had also left and in November, Nigel Melville was another RFU casualty. 

An overhaul later that year included the arrival of Conor O’Shea as director of performance rugby, Alan Dickens as under-20s head coach from Northampton, with John Pendlebury taking over the under-18s.

Rugby Journal is in England camp, specifically the first of the 2023/24 season for the full under-18s squad. Regional and specialist positional camps – such as a front-five camp earlier in the month – supplement the full squad get togethers which happen three or four times a year.

There are forty players attending including 21 capped players, and fourteen who are making their first appearance at a training day; the remainder have had a taste of training but no match action. We’re at Bisham Abbey, the National Sports Centre just outside Maidenhead, a camp that’s had many guises over the years. It’s been home to senior England men’s rugby, the Red Roses, England Hockey and also hosted training for England men’s football. 

The schedule runs from Thursday through to Saturday afternoon, with time allocated for meetings, analysis, stretching, gym, recovery and rugby.

Head coach John Pendlebury is leading the on-pitch session as we arrive. A former Rotherham, Gloucester and Yorkshire Carnegie player during his career, John retired in 2012, joining the Yorkshire academy as an assistant before eventually becoming academy manager. In 2017 he joined Wasps as academy manager, before joining England. “It was just before the last World Cup in 2019,” he recalls. “There was a number of changes off the back of that 2018/19 season and I had a good awareness of what the pathway was and what it looked like, where it had been in the 2000s, then where it got to in mid-2010s and where it was in and around that 2018-19 space.

“When I came in,” he continues, “honestly, there was just Alan [Dickens] heading up the 20s with a medic and an analyst, and he had a team manager. I came into the 18s and I had a team manager and an analyst. That was it. There had been a number of positions that were never there, because they looked to contract staff in, and the strategy at that point was they didn’t need to be full time.”

The pathway set-up that John arrived to was, to all intents and purposes, non-existent. Ryan had spoken about the detachment between the various pieces of the system; did that ring true for John? “It wasn’t so much that there was detachment, it just wasn’t there,” he admits. “They didn’t know who the best players were coming through, they didn’t know the players coming through. 

“If that’s your full-time job that is paying your mortgage, paying your rent, paying into your pension ... it’s different to if it only happens once in September, three days in October, once in November.”

For John, a lack of full-time staff was one of the first things that had to change. Of course, Covid meant that training and matches were all but shut down for two years, but since emerging from the pandemic the likes of James Hairsine, strength and conditioning, James Clegg, physio, Will Parkin, attack coach, and Nathan Catt, scrum coach, have joined the pathway system full time. Mark Mapletoft, who had been the under-18s attach coach, was promoted to run the under-20s. The pathway has started to look whole again. “Now we’ve got full-time staff in full-time positions. We’ve got specialist staff and specialist positions and now we can kick that on even further.” 

At age-grade, coaching specialism is more than just rugby knowledge. Development coaching is a skill in itself, something John has been drawn to since he was coming through at his home club, Wath, near Rotherham. So much so, he’s just written a dissertation on it. “It was my masters, the title was ‘Schoolboy to Senior Professional - What works for who, in what circumstances and why’. Your rugby pathway, opportunities, journey, skill set, potential, is completely different to, theoretically, your twin brother.” The Curry brothers, Tom and Ben, are a pertinent example.

“It was based on looking at some under-18 rugby players at the time and tracking them, seeing what experiences they had through that, what added value and what didn’t. I don’t know whether it’s any good, I haven’t had my results yet.” A few weeks after speaking, he recieves a distinction for his degree.

In 2021, the RFU published its new player pathway and development framework, which tracks player development through the age groups, aligned with a ‘purpose’ to each stage. The first is ‘explore the boundaries of players capabilities’, the next is ‘tactically adapt to win’, and the final purpose is ‘win’. According to the framework, the under-18s sit on the boundary between ‘exploring capabilities’ and ‘adapting to win’. As such, John’s key role is to guide players through this transition, out of the first phase and into the second and third. 

“Transition is interesting because it’s a phase itself,” he says. “Let’s take Henry Arundell, who transitioned very quickly. He’s got an athletic and physical skill set that is different to other players, he was [at the] right place right time and was able to make appearances from the bench for London Irish. So, then he ends up getting pulled into [senior] squads at nineteen, twenty years old, he was in there pretty quick. But has he transitioned because he’s gone eighteen, nineteen, twenty, or have you got another player that is taking a little bit longer because they haven’t got that opportunity?”

With each player on a different journey, the key is giving the players the right experiences at the right time. For some, that will involve more ‘exploring’ than others. “Players might be in a slightly different position with us because it’s about exploring, stretching and challenging,” he continues. “It’s knowing what to give them at what point, and what to stretch them on and what to hold them back on. We’ve got thirteens who could definitely play thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and we’re not too sure where they’ll end up. It takes time and skill exploration for that positional confirmation to come.

“The best bit for me is that that you really can see actual growth and development across six weeks. Then you think, six months, then you think blimey, hold on a minute, six years. If a youngster comes into academy at fifteen, plays England 18s, wins a first team contract and then goes into a first team, when he’s 22 you’ve known him six years and you’ve seen that development. The bit for me is, how good can they be when they are 22, and what do they need now, what experiences can we give them?

“It might be they’ve played England 18s against France. It might not be in the Stade de France in front of eighty thousand, but I’ve got on a bus, and I’ve travelled to the game, and I’ve experienced the nerves.”

Measuring success in development pathways is no easy task. You can look at the numbers of senior internationals who have progressed through the pathway, but even that isn’t simplistic. “Conor [O’Shea] is not saying to me: ‘John, there has to be two players from your England Under-18s every single year that goes on and wins thirty-plus caps. One year we might have ten players, another you might have five, and the next year you might not have any. Businesses have quarterly targets, but success is hard to quantify.”

In performance sport, results are always the final barometer - but at the development level, how important are they? In the Under-18 Six Nations Festival in April this year, England lost just one of their three games and only by a single point, a 22-23 loss to France, but made up for it by defeating an unbeaten Ireland 56-14 in Dublin. They built on that success over their summer tour to South Africa, securing two resounding victories, a 41-0 revenge over France and 76-15 against Western Province U18, before being edged 33-19 by South Africa. The under-20s, meanwhile, finished a disappointing fourth in the Six Nations, and fourth in the World Championship. 

Despite the steadying of the pathway ship, there is still a distinct gap from the success of the past. However, for John, that has to be taken in context. “You know when Coca-Cola started? You’ve got this drink, it’s a dark colour, fizzy, nice. They’re making loads of money on it, so Mr Pepsi makes Pepsi, Mr. Rola-Cola makes Rola-Cola, and Mr Dandelion and Burdock comes along. So Coca-Cola has to level it up, Diet Coke and Coke Zero come along.

“I’m not saying [England] were right out at the front, but back when I was at Yorkshire, we had Pete Walton regularly coming in and checking in on the players, we had John Fletcher heading it up. England had that – Scotland didn’t, Wales didn’t, Ireland didn’t, and France didn’t. So they started looking over the fence, they’ve upskilled themselves since then.

“We need all the nations to be good to make us better, because if they’re great, we’ve got to be unreal. If we’re falling down in some areas we’ve got to get back on the bike and start doing it.

“Ireland have the best academy system in the world, ITV will tell you that, they did a thing on it,” he says, tongue firmly in cheek. “I loved watching that, good luck to them – we beat them in Dublin. They haven’t won a World Cup yet. We haven’t [in our time], but we’ve been nearer than them [in both 2019 and 2023]. But we’ve got a crap academy system, we’ve got a broken system that’s falling down. And Eddie Jones says that we just ain’t got the players.”

Maybe Eddie had a point at the time – after all, it was during his tenure that the system was stripped to its bare bones. Only time will tell if this those coming through now will prove him wrong. 

Sale Sharks’ Jack Lightbrown is one of the more remarkable players in  camp this weekend. He’s the perfect example of a player exploring his capabilities – less than two years ago he was playing centre for his club, and today he’s been doing units sessions with England under-18s front row. There has been a lot of change in Jack’s rugby life of late, learning a new position and choosing to commit to one code.  “I was at Wigan for two years,” explains Jack, “and then last year, I decided to kick on with Sale. I played both codes for quite a few years actually, trying to balance it as much as I could, but some Sundays it was league in the morning, union in the afternoon. I loved it, couldn’t do it now through.”

Ultimately, it was the appeal of international rugby that made his choice for him. “I felt like there was a lot more opportunity in union,” he says. “I really want to represent my country, I felt like in rugby league there wasn’t too many opportunities, but in union there’s so many. And it felt right at the time, I just had a feeling.” 

His league days have helped him immensely in his union game, from his catch pass to his tackle to his technical skills. So much so that, within months of committing to union, he received an email from England. “My first call up was September last year, that was to the north camp. That was pretty surreal, I’d only just committed to union and Sale. I was in a completely new position; I’d just moved from centre to backrow, and I’d started jumping and all that. I didn’t expect it, I didn’t know what was going about it to be honest, it was a very nice surprise to be fair.”

At only sixteen, Jack had changed sport, changed position and been called up for his country two age-groups above his own. That was in September, and by February he was making his debut in the Six Nations Festival against Ireland, also playing the following week against Italy. “I struggled quite a bit to be honest,” he reflects, “but I learned a lot about myself. I knew this anyway, but I dwell on things a lot, If I’ve done something wrong, I tend to sort of dwell on it, so I’m trying to work on focusing on it and rectifying it when the time comes.

“I spoke to the psychologist James Mackenzie today, which I’d never thought of doing. We just spoke about that dwelling and some confidence stuff.” His second position change in as many years, exploring the world of the front row at this week’s camp, has tested his confidence, but he sees it as a welcome challenge. “Yesterday in the units I was a bit overwhelmed. I want to do things right, but you got to get things wrong to get things right.”

With John, a fellow northerner, Jack has built a strong relationship with a coach who is willing to push him, help him explore his skills and strive for his goals, the next of which is to secure a contract with Sale. “[John] is direct, he says it as it is, but he also knows how you operate,” he says. “For being a coach of a national team, who holds multiple development camps, he speaks to loads of different people, meets loads of different 18 year old’s, it’s pretty amazing how much he actually tries to engage and tries to get to know you.”

Will Parkin, formerly head coach at Northampton Saints under-18s, is running his first camp as full-time attack coach this week. He has been in and around the group for a while, joining them for their tour of South Africa over the summer, officially starting in September. Will is a first among England pathway coaches having not played professionally himself, starting coaching at a young age working in schools around Northampton.   

“What my job mainly entails is getting out and working with some of the highlighted high potential players, one on one, then getting out and watching school, college and club games,” he says. “So, lots of time in the car, but watching lots of rugby.” 

After highlighting talent and whittling down the names for the squad, the coaches design a camp that fits their goals. “So our strapline with the under-18s in terms of how we play is SAS, so speed, attachment, space. We’ve blocked it out into three periods, so over summer we were looking at speed - that’s the most important thing about our game, that it’s fast. That was the first opportunity those boys had coming into an England environment, so that was our main focus for South Africa.

“This week was the first time we’d seen them since then, and we’re starting to layer in the attachment piece. We’ve introduced a new way of attack, our BAM attack, so we want the ‘ball always moving’, that was a huge focus for us at this camp. So those were the key pillars for planning this camp, playing with speed and attachment and keeping the ball moving.” 

The work continues off the pitch too. Each session is filmed for analysis, even utilising a drone for a birds-eye view, which the players sit down and review as a group. There’s also opportunity between camps for players to discuss clips from training and their matches with coaches. 

Given the nature of age-group rugby, the player turnover is extensive each year - some will only do one year, some two, but its key for the coaches to be able to build relationships with the players in the little time they have together. 

“The relationship side is one of the most important things,” believes Will. “It’s the same as working in an academy, it can be a bit intimidating [coming into camp] and that’s the last thing you want those lads to think at that age. You want to be able to build a relationship with these boys to support them on and off the field, but also to hold them accountable.

“The camps are a great way to build those relationships, but then also just staying in contact with them, catching up around their school games or their college games, having conversations that perhaps aren’t always just about rugby, and finding out a little bit more about them as them as individuals.”

The coaches are important in building this environment, but in this under-18s set-up, Penny Craig takes charge of all things non-rugby. She’s been a team manager in the pathway system for almost fifteen years and, despite claiming she ‘only books the buses’, she does a whole lot more than that. “On a good day it’s the best job in the world, and on a bad day it’s still better than most others,” she says. “Watching them travel this journey is just fantastic. Some of them go on to greater things, some will continue onto a different life, but either way I’d hope the experiences they have are positive.”

In her time she’s seen a host of talent come through the under-18s doorway, even some of her recent graduates having featured in the World Cup, starting against South Africa in the World Cup semi-final. “Freddie Steward got there really quickly, and I’m thinking, ‘Freddie?’. But no, he’s a gorgeous character, he did well in under-18s, but it was nowhere near, ‘he’s going to be senior team straight away’. I think he’s got 30 caps now already.”

If John and Will are in charge of the rugby side of camp, Penny has a huge role to play in the human side. “Part of my role is to make sure that there’s an environment for them to flourish. Take the South Africa tour, sometimes it’s their first time flying, sometimes the furthest they’ve travelled, sometimes first time they’ve been away without their parents. And it’s hard work for them, a long way from home, so you have to make sure there’s some non-rugby stuff.”

With some of the players at camp as young as sixteen, it’s only natural that Penny has grown to be the maternal figure with strong connections to those that come through. More than anybody, she understands the importance of having coaches and staff who appreciate the needs of young players. The pathway had that with Fletcher and Walton, and again with John at the helm, but the transition period between the two was difficult.

“We had people in post, lovely people, but potentially not the right people for this age group at times. But when [John] started, he was the right personality, the right person. He nurtures them, he understood these are still players which need to make mistakes. It’s feels like, after Covid and everything, it’s all pulling together and moving in the right direction.”

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Danté Kim

This extract was taken from issue 24 of Rugby.
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