In the wake of England Rugby’s latest humbling at the hands of South Africa there has been a lot of discussion about the ‘English identity’ in the game. This is why the whole world loves us so much. Everyone else is playing rugby. We are searching for our identity.
This concept was a blessing and a curse bestowed on us by Eddie Jones at the start of his tenure in charge of the national team. He wanted England to get back to ‘nasty’ rugby and being tough to beat. In the blink of an eye he defined us. Pragmatic. Hard.
Dan Cole recently nut-shelled the idea as “being strong in the set piece, scrum, lineout, maul” and Ben Youngs his podcast co-host agreed that England had to at least “earn the right to play”.
Behind all the angst, however, is the suspicion that we, as a nation, are somehow missing out on some untapped potential – a way of doing it that might be better than the way we are doing it now. Are we clinging to an identity that is not really us? There is a name for that seed of doubt and it crops up again and again with the pundits – Northampton.
Full disclosure, I am writing this as a long-time fan of Northampton Saints the current Prem Champions, however I think it is fair to say when people want evidence that England is somehow not yet the sum of its parts they start naming the Saints backline. They talk about ‘magic’ and ‘generational talent’ and you would think, as a fan, I would take some vicarious fan pleasure from that but I don’t at all. I find that kind of language a little bit irritating. I think they are missing the point.
A couple of years back I wrote a piece calling out what I saw as the snobbery around recognising the success of Northampton Saints in the wider rugby media. To be fair, success has addressed that somewhat especially in the run up to this year’s championship. Northampton School for Boys reaching their own cup final and famously honouring their players with the Saints and Cobblers ‘City Lights’ shoe army chant was a viral moment online that spoke of deep community bonds. Granted it is not dirty faced young scamps from the Victorian St James boys’ club but it as about close as it gets these days.
The point is, Northampton is not doing anything magical. It is not doing anything revolutionary or special. It is not even throwing money at the problem. Northampton is doing rugby the common sense way, connected to the world it is living in, farming its possibilities and giving us local heroes to follow. True, some players are not from the town but when they become heroes – at this club – they become local. It is a sustainable way to run a rugby club. It even worked when we weren’t winning but it feels a lot better now we are.
And at the heart of it all is a kind of joyous approach to the game in the way it is played and the way it is celebrated. This isn’t a coaching tactic from Phil Dowson and Sam Vesty per se, it is a product of the environment they have created. Vesty will say he is not asking his players to do anything other than the rugby that is coached at age group level all over the country. Catch and pass. Look for space. Simple skills executed well under pressure. When you knit it all together it looks amazing but the core actions are straightforward.
There is a philosophy of approving of ‘good mistakes’ – things that go wrong because you are trying to do something better. There is a challenge to the conservatism of ‘should I try to make the pass?’ with ‘can I afford not to attempt the pass?’ Famously this season scrum-half Archie McParland hit a rich vein of form after being told to stop worrying about being perfect.
If it’s all so easy why isn’t everyone doing it? Because for a long time the moneyball player in English rugby has been a kind of tank designed to conquer rucks. A lot of people think that psychologically English rugby never really recovered from Jonah Lomu running through the Underwood brothers many, many, moons ago. I’m not even joking about that. For a while the England team had Manu Tuilagi – a talismanic wrecking ball to swing back the other way but it turned out that having that big guy was not the answer. There was England with Manu and England without Manu – two entirely different prospects. It makes you wonder if the brutal pragmatism of the ‘English identity’ is really about our insecurities. Order is strength. Strength is strength. We have been looking for the best big lads either consciously or unconsciously and failing to make best use of the rest.
Until Northampton Saints… spending less, scoring more, pleasing more, winning championships. Our players might well be a golden generation of geniuses but labelling them that is taking away from the tradecraft they have put in. It is dismissing their work as miracles. It is making them an anomaly rather than a product of good people doing good things right. It is a challenge to the orthodoxy that this could emerge naturally out of Northampton of all places – not glamorous Bath, not the city dandies at Quins, not the gritty reliability of Tigers or the winning machinery of Saracens.
Perhaps no-one is more emblematic of England rugby’s struggle with itself than Henry Pollock. Ironically, although he has many of the qualities of a ruck conquering tank, Henry is also expressive and impulsive on the pitch. He takes on ideas and situations that would be too 50/50 for other mindsets – ripping balls in tackles, kicking and chasing, tackling and jackaling, engaging with the crowd. Other people do these things but Henry has a knack of doing them when they matter just a bit more. He attracts huge amounts of scorn from people who seem to be offended by how much fun he is having as a young man at the top of his game. He quickly got selected for both England and the Lions and has enjoyed a meteoric rise on the back of consistently good performances. His try celebrations irritate some but people should remember that Saints were often underestimated underdogs in the games when Henry was breaking through. He was punching up with his little victory mimes because none of us – fan or opposition – expected him to do those things. When he scored his hat trick against Fiji he mimicked Bellingham’s spreading arms celebration because Henry is a fan just like us. He’s got game in this area. We should just let him get on with it.
Ironically the same public bemoaning a stodgy predictable England team that doesn’t realise the potential of its resources is also happy to rub its hands with glee over the prospect of Pollock getting ‘taught a lesson’ by someone who is big and mean enough. Perhaps it is this bizarre compulsion to stomp the individuality out of people, to cut them down to size, to make them fit into a pre-conceived ‘English identity’ is the real problem.
We can’t really decide our identity like it’s an object you can manufacture – a piece of art. Our identity is our body of work. It is what we actually did in games but it is also everything else around it. The money. The data. The clubs. The huge player pool compared to other nations. It’s all the things we have because we are us. It’s whether we are happy or not. It’s who we are when we are not winning. It is certainly not something you should be thinking about when you are deciding whether to draw the defender and offload, or take it into contact. Northampton’s current successful era is not a fairytale aberration from English norms. It is a different kind of pragmatism that is about empowering the players that show up. It is just as much a part of the English identity as the grunt and grind of the power beasts. We will be a happier rugby nation if we recognise it and use it.
