ENGLAND FEEL ‘UNJUSTLY BAGGED’ AS IRELAND PRAISE ADDS ‘FUEL TO THE FIRE’
The head coach of England has revealed the perceived snub fuelling his team’s bid to win a first junior World Cup since 2016.
The Six Nations champions play their second match, against Fiji in Cape Town on Thursday, having opened up with a 40-21 come-from-behind victory over Argentina.
They do so with fire in their bellies due to a piece ITV put out during the senior World Cup last autumn which they claim heaped praise on Irish rugby’s player ‘pathway’.
‘Fuel to the fire’
Given Ireland were going into a second consecutive World Cup ranked number one in the sport it was not unreasonable to focus on the system behind their impressive rise.
But England head coach Mark Mapletoft says: “It definitely added a bit of fuel to the fire.
“The media are very quick to jump on bandwagons and ITV doing that massive piece on Ireland, during the World Cup, and how good their system is, has definitely stayed with us.
“That was the tip of the iceberg for our pathway staff. You’re kind of feeling, for a domestic broadcaster to do that… we’re a British audience and they were covering a different country’s pathway and saying how good it is.
“We won a Six Nations Grand Slam in 2021, people forget that. It wasn’t that long ago. But because Ireland then won back-to-back Grand Slams (2022-23) and France the last three Junior World Cups, it’s like England must be s**t. Well, we’re not.”
Whether or not this indignation is merited, England used it to relieve Ireland of the U20 Six Nations crown, drawing with the young Men in Green before going over to France and sticking 45 points on the world champions.
Now they plan to set the record straight on the global stage by ending an eight-year title drought since their purple patch of 2013-16 when they won three of the four tournaments.
“We haven’t been as competitive as we’d like to have been,” Mapletoft concedes. “But we’re definitely emerging out the other side. We’re getting back to the level we need to be at every year.
“Everybody has their own ideas of how the system should work and what the model should look like; ‘France do this, Ireland do that, we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t do this’.
“We have to do what we feel is right. We feel the system was being bagged a bit, and unjustly so.
“If you look at the cycle of particularly under 20s, 15-10 years ago France were a non-entity. They suddenly decide to put a lot of resource in and bang. The same with Ireland.
“New Zealand for years were the benchmark at under-20s, I can’t remember the last time they made a final. So things tend to be cyclical.
“It’s taken time (for us) to get stuff up and running post Covid, set against the landscape of what’s been going on in the club game. With so much financial uncertainty, it’s very hard to invest in young players when you’re struggling to pay the bills, week to week, of your first team.
“But what the Professional Game Board (PGB) will give us, hopefully, from the summer onwards, is our own model.”
By then this tournament will be in the history books and Mapletoft has high hopes his squad will not only fare well, but many will then push on for senior Test recognition.
“It’s an exciting time,” he says. “You’d like to think we could be really, really competitive over the next couple of World Cup cycles if we tweak a few things in the right direction.
“We have a group of really good young players. There are guys in the 20s now who, 100 per cent, have a chance of going to the next (senior) World Cup.”
Mapletoft tells a story about the first night at England’s warm-weather training camp in Portugal shortly after the senior team had lost to South Africa in the World Cup semi-final in Paris.
“I sat the boys down and told them four years earlier to the day there had been another under-20 group in the same seats, of whom six either came under serious consideration, or were actually selected for the World Cup in France.”
The former England fly-half reels off the names. Freddie Steward, Jack van Poortvliet, Raffi Quirke, Theo Dan, George Martin, Ollie Chessum.
“‘Lads’, I said. ‘That’s about a fifth of the group that went to the 2023 World Cup. And Freddie now has 30 caps. There’s somebody here that in four years’ time could be in that same position’.
“Honestly, you should have seen the look on their faces. I don’t think they understand sometimes how close they are to that space.”
Seeing Chandler Cunningham-South go from under-20s last July to being capped in the Six Nations seven months later and now a starter against the All Blacks this weekend, will have helped that understanding.
So too the apparent ease with which Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, 21, has adapted to the Test game. He wins his fifth cap in Dunedin on Saturday.
“The junior World Cup is super important,” Mapletoft adds. “A brilliant opportunity to experience an elite environment against all the other best players in the world, away from home on a tour just like you’d experience at senior level.
“Nothing prepares you for that like a junior World Cup.”
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2024-07-02T14:05:25Z dg43tfdfdgfd