'We don't want be a feeding ground for other clubs': Irish out to ensure history doesn't repeat itself with latest crop of rising academy stars
Ex-Ireland and Munster boss Declan Kidney may be a relative novice to Gallagher Premiership rugby having only pitched up for work in England in March 2018 and then spending his first full season exiled to the Championship, but he knows enough of the history of London Irish to know that he must now have a consistently competitive side or risk losing the latest wave of youthful talent.
It’s been a major pitfall for the Irish this last decade, ever since they went into reverse after a 2008 European Cup semi-final appearance was followed by defeat in the 2009 Premiership final. They have one of the best academies set-ups around but the stagnation of their first-team has resulted in that talent – especially their young backs – falling prey to rival clubs.
Delon Armitage headed to Toulon in 2012, Anthony Watson and Jonathan Joseph to Bath in 2013, and Joe Cokanasiga and Johnny Williams to Bath and Newcastle respectively in 2018 to name but five of the many names they nurtured who left for greener pastures.
It’s a pattern that Kidney is conscious of as he nears the end of his second full Premiership in charge with youthful wings Ollie Hassell-Collins, a 21-year-old with 32 top-flight appearances and 14 tries, and Ben Loader, the 22-year-old with 30 Premiership runs and nine tries, regulars in a useful back three complemented by 23-year-old full-back Tom Parton, another academy graduate at Irish who has six tries from his 23 Premiership appearances.
Irish are currently seventh with four matches remaining and chasing down their best finish in the Premiership since the seventh spot they secured in 2011/12. It’s a task that starts on Tuesday night with the visit of defending champions Exeter to Brentford and Kidney is acutely aware of the need to finish as strongly as possible to send out the message that the Exiles really do mean business and are a genuine career home for its academy talent, not a shop window for others to flash the cash and lure them elsewhere.
? @MattRogerson_8 is the cover star in 'Exile' on Tuesday night – as Irish host @ExeterChiefs at the Brentford Community Stadium.
Our ? to download digital match day programme will be available from tomorrow!#LIRvEXE pic.twitter.com/lwnrMZuIUb
— London Irish (@londonirish) May 17, 2021
Looking at the situation London Irish find themselves in near the end of a second term back in the top-flight that is an improvement on last season’s tenth-place finish, Kidney told RugbyPass: “Exeter are from a catchment where they don’t have a lot of competition. When you are in London it’s different because we have a couple of teams, Harlequins are just down the road and Saracens aren’t too far away with Ealing there too, so players have lots of choices.
“What you want to try and do is the players that do come into your system you want to hang onto them. I wouldn’t say the progress London Irish have made is since when Les (Kiss) and I arrived. The club was already progressing and we just tried to add a little of ourselves to it.
“If we had Anthony Watson, Joe Cokanasiga, Johny Williams and Jonathan Joseph, if they were all here we would have a nice conundrum for selection. What we want to do is make sure we create an environment so that the work being done at underage level is for the benefit of the London Irish club and not be a feeding ground for other clubs.
“It’s not like soccer where you have transfer fees, so we want to make ourselves good enough so that players want to stay. You want to give these younger fellas a go but you must compete in the league as well too. It’s a bit of a drip-feed so that when they are good enough they get picked.
“We have a few others like Ben Donnell (20, back row), who has had a fair bit of exposure, Lovejoy Chawatama (28, prop) is a slower burner who has come into it, Phil Cokanasiga (19, centre) got to play last week so we have quite a number coming through like that but if you are going to do it on the back of results like the last one that is no good for anybody (the 27-52 loss at Newcastle).
“What you have got to do is drip feed it [the rookie talent] into a positive environment. That is not always winning matches but it is certainly being at the competitive end of the game when it comes to the last five or ten minutes.”
The thing with rookies is they can flatter to deceive – they can look immensely promising when they first get a look-in but then don’t have the consistency to follow through and make themselves long-term regulars. It is why Kidney is pleased with the contribution of Waisake Naholo to the club.
The former All Blacks winger has very seldom featured since signing on big bucks – February 2020 was his last Premiership outing due to serious injury – but the 30-year-old’s influence on the rookies making their breakthrough has apparently been invaluable. “You can probably talk about the back three as a whole,” said Kidney about his satisfaction at homegrown talent making the grade, especially Hassell-Collins who tops the clean breaks chart for this season with 31, seven more than next-best Alex Dombrandt of Harlequins.
@BBCSport you’ve done me dirty pic.twitter.com/dX3Kxlotty
— Ollie HassellCollins (@OHassellcollins) February 22, 2020
“The three of them [Hassell-Collins, Loader and Parton] have come through the academy system here in London Irish and there have been a few others that have gone to other clubs. When he [Hassell-Collins] is learning off fellas like Waisake and in fairness someone like Tom Homer as well then too, a guy who has good Premiership experience, between the work done in the academy and learning from a few senior players, he is developing all the time.
“Ollie would be the first to say there is a lot more in him to come from him but the fact that when you are at the top of a statistic your name is probably going to be out there which means that now people will be watching him a bit more. As you well know from the international scene, your first international in lots of ways is your hardest but it is also your easiest because the opposition has the least footage on you.
“As time goes on now space will become tighter for Olly but by him occupying the attentions of other defenders hopefully it will open up some space around him. You see it in football whereby a midfielder will go off and often take two defenders with him leaving space for somebody else so if Olly isn’t the highest on the statistical breaks as long as we are as a team that is all that will matter.
“That is just one of the areas where there is loads of growth in it for him. He has worked really hard to try and add to his game. It has been a typical coming through the academy and the Championship year was where it benefited us as a club, we knew we could blood a lot of the younger fellas.
"I realised that to be a professional rugby player you needed cardio"
@LiRFC prop @Ljchawatama talks the fitness step-up needed to play in the Premiership, among other things, with @heagneyl ??????https://t.co/SQVuC1QfUc
— RugbyPass (@RugbyPass) March 15, 2020
“He had 50 caps the last day and a lot of those were achieved in the Championship two years ago. Also his body has developed to allow him to be fit to be selected regularly because that is another part to it when you are younger as well, sometimes you can play two or three games and then physically you are not up to the rigours of it and you can miss two or three.
“But he has managed to make himself available for most of the games which is a credit to him and his preparation and I’d like to think that is part and parcel of the structure around him, both in other players and in the staff that have been good at keeping him going. Where is he in what he can achieve? I’d say around 70 per cent.
“There is still another ten or twenty per cent growth in him on the basis that nobody ever gets to 100 per cent. You get to 100 per cent one match in your career but for him to get to that 80, 90 per cent there is still more growth in him and the great thing is he knows that himself.
“He’ll probably tell you less than I do, that is the best way I can put it. He is a quiet fella but he works hard on his game and the work between himself, Tom and Ben on the other wing, they work closely with one another and they are a sub-unity within the backs as well as individuals. It’s really pleasing they are playing off one another.
Look who is finally on the comeback trail ? https://t.co/Id8KwUYKKv
— RugbyPass (@RugbyPass) April 20, 2021
“It is disappointing that Waisake wasn’t fit to take part out on the pitch but it is his professionalism as well in and around those quiet conversations that you have with players because the biggest influence on players is other players in terms of growing up and as a coach you just want to create that type of environment.
“He would have sat down with them and gone through it. Some days they will have come off really fed up and he will have gone through it with them to show the good things that he did. There will be days when they will get two tries and he will just point out to them you touched the ball down but that is your job as a winger.
“There was an example the last day: Ben would have got a try but as bad as the last day was it was Ollie’s covering tackle in the last play of the game that stopped the scoreboard from being even worse for us. It’s understanding the hidden stuff is just as important as the stuff that grabs the headlines.”
Asked if Naholo, who made a reserve team comeback last month, might make Premiership selection before the season is over, Kidney added: “We are looking at that. It’s a case where you don’t want to risk serious injury, long-term injury going forward so he has trained since then. He has been training more regularly and it’s just building up strength in it all the time. Whether that time will come within the time that we have left within this season, that is what we are taking a look at right now.”
'It's a unique pathway. Not a lot of guys end up doing it that way in pro rugby and I'd like to see more have that ambition.'@londonirish back row @MattRogerson_8 took the route less travelled to professional rugby, as @heagneyl ??? finds out #LIRvWOR https://t.co/50pwO86O0E
— RugbyPass (@RugbyPass) March 14, 2021
Comments on RugbyPass
Bulls by 5. Plus another 50.
3 Go to commentsJohan Goosen avatar. Cute. Surely someone at RP knows how to do a google image search?
3 Go to commentsCan’t these games play a little earlier? Asking for a friend.
3 Go to commentsIt’s impressive that we can see huge stadiums with attendance in the 40 000 to 50 000 region. It shows how popular this competition is becoming. What is even more impressive is the massive growth in broadcast viewership. The URC is one of the two best leagues in the World, the other being the Top14.
7 Go to commentsChristie is not Sottish, like the majority of the Scotland team.
2 Go to commentsHold the phone, decline over-rated. Is it a one game, dead cat bounce or the real thing? Has the Penney dropped? Stay tuned.
45 Go to commentsTotally deserved win for the Crusaders Far smarter than the Chiefs who seem to be avoiding the basics when it matters Hotham showed them what was missing and Hannah seems a real find - a tad light but that can be fixed over time
8 Go to commentsGreat insight into the performance culture with Sarries and I predict Christie will be a fixture in the Scotland team now for some time to come. However, he is slightly missing his own point around Scotland “being soft” when he cites physicality examples in defence of that slight. The issue is much closer to the example he referenced around feeling off before a game but being told “it doesn’t matter, you can still play well” by Farrell. Until Scotland can get their psyche in that square, they will carry on folding under extreme pressure…
2 Go to comments> We are having to adapt, evolve and innovate more than when we were in Super Rugby where there was only really one style that everybody had to play to gain the most success. Have = able to? Interesting what that one style might be? I thought SA sides still had bad tours now, or at least bad schedule, months away? Those extra few hours flights have to be a killer though, no surprise to see their sides doing so badly at the start of the season each year. I wouldn’t enjoy that unfairness as a supporter.
7 Go to commentsThe problem for NZ, and Aus, is they ripped up the SR model and lost a massive chunk of revenue that hasn’t been replaced. Don’t forget SA clubs went North because they were left with no choice, Argy unceremoniously binned and Japan cast adrift. Now SR wasn’t perfect, far from it, but they’ve jumped into something without an effective plan, so far, to replace what they’ve lost. The biggest revenue potential now lies in Japan but it won’t be easy or quick to unlock, they are incredibly insular in culture as a nation. In the meantime, there is a serious time bomb sitting under SH rugby and if it happens then the current financial challenges will look like a picnic. IF the Boks follow their provincial teams and head north then it’s revenue meltdown. Not guaranteed to happen but the status quo is a very odd hybrid, with the Boks pointing one way and the clubs pointing the other way. And for as long as that remains then the threat is real.
45 Go to commentsI think Etene has had some good tuition, likely while at the Warriors to be a professional that helped his rugby jump, but he was certainly thrown in the deep end way too early. Should have arguably 20 less SR caps, and therefor a way better record that he does at his age, but his development would have been fast tracked by the need to satiate his signing away from league. Again, credit to him and others that he has done it so well. Easy to fall over under that pressure in the big leagues like that but he kept at it when I myself wasn’t sure he was good enough.
1 Go to commentsAwesome story. I wonder what a bigger American (SA) scene might have mean for Brex.
1 Go to comments“Johnny McNicholl and the Crusaders” save a Penney. Who has been in camp this week and showed them how to play?
8 Go to commentsSo, reports of the Crusaders’ demise / terminal decline are perhaps just - slightly - premature/exaggerated…? 🤔 Will we see a deep-dive into that by the estimable Rugbypass scribes, and maybe one or two mea culpas? Thought not.
8 Go to comments1. The Chiefs are rudderless without DMac, which enhances his AB chances 2. Chiefs pack are powderpuffs. The hard men arent there anymore 3. They had their golden title chance last yr and wont threaten this yr. Gone in second round of playoffs.
8 Go to commentsHonestly, why did you have to publish such a foolish article the day they play us? 😂
45 Go to comments> They are not standalone entities. They are linked to an amateur association which holds the FFR licence that allows the professional side to compete in the league. That’s a great rule. This looks like the chicken or egg professional scenario. How long is it going to be before the club can break even (if that is even a thing in French rugby)? If the locals aren’t into well it would be good to se them drop to amateur level (is it that far?). Hope they can reset from this level and be more practical, there will be a time when they can rebuild (if France has there setup right).
1 Go to commentsWhat about changing the ball? To something heavier and more pointed that bounces unpredictably. Not this almost round football used these days.
35 Go to commentsThis is the problem with conservative mindsets and phycology, and homogenous sports, everybody wants to be the same, use the i-win template. Athlete wise everyone has to have muscles and work at the gym to make themselves more likely to hold on that one tackle. Do those players even wonder if they are now more likely to be tackled by that player as a result of there “work”? Really though, too many questions, Jake. Is it better Jake? Yes, because you still have that rugby of ole that you talk about. Is it at the highest International level anymore? No, but you go to your club or checkout your representative side and still engage with that ‘beautiful game’. Could you also have a bit of that at the top if coaches encouraged there team to play and incentivized players like Damian McKenzie and Ange Capuozzo? Of course we could. Sadly Rugby doesn’t, or didn’t, really know what direction to go when professionalism came. Things like the state of northern pitches didn’t help. Over the last two or three decades I feel like I’ve been fortunate to have all that Jake wants. There was International quality Super Rugby to adore, then the next level below I could watch club mates, pulling 9 to 5s, take on the countries best in representative rugby. Rugby played with flair and not too much riding on the consequences. It was beautiful. That largely still exists today, but with the world of rugby not quite getting things right, the picture is now being painted in NZ that that level of rugby is not required in the “pathway” to Super Rugby or All Black rugby. You might wonder if NZR is right and the pathway shouldn’t include the ‘amateur’, but let me tell you, even though the NPC might be made up of people still having to pull 9-5s, we know these people still have dreams to get out of that, and aren’t likely to give them. They will be lost. That will put a real strain on the concept of whether “visceral thrill, derring-do and joyful abandon” type rugby will remain under the professional level here in NZ. I think at some point that can be eroded as well. If only wanting the best athlete’s at the top level wasn’t enough to lose that, shutting off the next group, or level, or rugby players from easy access to express and showcase themselves certainly will. That all comes back around to the same question of professionalism in rugby and whether it got things right, and rugby is better now. Maybe the answer is turning into a “no”?
35 Go to commentsWow, didn’t realise there was such apathy to URC in SA, or by Champions Cup teams. Just read Nick’s article on Crusaders, are Sharks a similar circumstance? I think SA rugby has been far more balanced than NZs, no?
4 Go to comments