Vesty: 'I’m probably not a great example of it, I only got a couple'

Sam Vesty has claimed he isn’t a good example of a player who used England A representation to go and win Test caps with his country. The Northampton head coach only made two senior international appearances – versus Argentina in 2009 under Martin Johnson.

He instead suggested that the playing career of Phil Dowson, his Saints’ director of rugby who made seven appearances in 2012 under Stuart Lancaster, was a better illustration of what the A team pathway can achieve high up the chain.

England will assemble next Tuesday at Loughborough University to prepare for their first A international since they toured South Africa as the Saxons in 2016. A squad of 27 has been named for the February 25 match versus Portugal at Leicester where Vesty will act as attack coach under George Skivington.

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Asked for an insight into his own playing career and whether exposure at A team level was important in him going to be capped at Test level by England, Vesty said: “I’ve done a few, I’ve got a lot of England A caps. I dunno, probably 10-plus I guess… (but) I’m probably not a great example of it, I only got a couple.

“Phil Dowson, who is DoR at Northampton, we talk about it a lot – he had a lot of Saxons and England A caps back then and Phil went on to have a bit more of an international career than I did. Just going away together as a group, learning how to play with suddenly having combinations that are all different and you have all got to get on the same page within a week.

“It’s a great challenge and a great window to what Test rugby is about. The game on the pitch is the same game but there are lots of challenges in and around that, so it really helps in that respect.”

Vesty’s previous experience of coaching at international level was seven years ago when he assisted Eddie Jones’ England on their 2017 tour to Argentina. A vacancy for Vesty was created by Jones having a number of his regular staff away working with the British and Irish Lions in New Zealand.

“I learned an awful lot on that tour,” he recalled. “It was a fantastic opportunity and that group played fantastic rugby and a lot of those guys went on to have really good England careers. I took a lot back from that tour and put it into my coaching at Northampton.”

Now, with England bringing back their A team for the first time in eight years, Vesty has another opportunity to coach at representative level. “It’s different to what I do with a very consistent group here at Northampton.

“It takes you out of your comfort zone, asks different questions of myself and lots of different challenges. To go and work with some really talented, young future England players is really exciting. I’m looking forward to it and I know I am going to learn a lot.

“I’ll be asking the boys to get their heads up and look and see what is in front of them and they will probably get bored with me saying that. I hope that that sticks with them from an attack point of view.

“Getting your heads up, playing the game that is in front of you would hopefully be the big take home that we can get across. You can’t reinvent the wheel, it has got to be simple in a week. But that would certainly be my starting position.”

The England A squad of 27 will be supplemented on Tuesday evening by a number of players dropping down from Steve Borthwick’s Guinness Six Nations squad. England are currently two wins from two in the championship for the first time since 2019, but what has Vesty made of their attack so far?

“You can see they struggled to get across the line but you can see there are development bits. They are trying to do things in a certain way and you can see the buds of that growing, although perhaps it’s not smooth.

“But you do see the ball moving into the spaces a little bit more and you can see people looking for the spaces a little bit more. Time is always your friend in (developing) those bits.”