Peter Jackson: Can’t blame Callum Sheedy for keeping his options open
He will do so via the residential route from September by which time Bristol’s youngest playmaker will still be 19.
Assuming he sidesteps through the minefield of a hazardous occupation and makes the most of his talent, admittedly a dangerous assumption, Sheedy, below, will have to choose between the three feathers, the shamrock and the red rose.
Born in Cardiff to Irish-Welsh parents, he is one of a new breed of embryonic professionals who have taken deliberate steps to ensuring all options remain open. He has done so by opting out of the Wales U20 squad. There was a time when those capped at U20 level would still be free to switch allegiance. The WRU, having long since abandoned its A-team as a cost-cutting exercise, put a stop to that by declaring their U20s to be their national second team.
Anyone setting foot in an U20 match, even for the last 30 seconds, was tied to that country. Steven Shingler, the Scarlets‘ goalkicking fly half-cum-centre then at London Irish, discovered that to his cost when Scotland tried to pick him on the strength of his father’s nationality.
The WRU objected and won the argument, a factor, no doubt, in Sheedy’s decision to stay unattached. He does so at a time when the demarcation lines on nationality have never been more blurred, when cross-border competition between England and Wales to find uncut diamonds has been raised to new levels of ferocity.
Recruiting agents with degrees in genealogy in both countries have become increasingly important to spot the next potential superstar before anyone else. George North claims he would always have chosen Wales come what may but England’s coaches at the time missed a trick by not realising when the Scarlets first turned him loose that their monstrous wing had been born in Kings Lynn.
More recently, Wales may also have missed a trick in their courtship of Exeter’s mountainous Yorkshireman, Tomas Francis. The 22-year-old may be a Tyke but as soon as Warren Gatland’s scouts informed him that grandma Francis came from Abercrave, the head coach went into overdrive.
Having invited him to train before the autumn series, the Welsh plan to put Francis on the bench against Fiji, give him ten minutes or so and forever eliminate the danger of the player falling into English hands backfired. Francis did not consider himself ready.
England will already be busting a collective gut to reclaim him, and why not, given that Francis comes from the grand old walled city of York. He took up the game at one of England’s leading public schools, Ampleforth College, whose alumni include Lawrence Dallaglio, Cardinal Basil Hume and King Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho.
Francis began learning his trade in Doncaster before graduating to Exeter. One look at the damage he did to England’s loosehead Alex Corbisiero against Northampton last Sunday explains what the fuss is all about.
He has come a long way since taking rugby up for the prosaic purpose of keeping his weight down. Even at a slightly slimmed down 21 stone, he is still a massive unit and now that every mover-and-shaker in the English game has been alerted concerted attempts are being made to keep him in the fold.
Judging by what Francis has had to say on the subject, he will take some shifting. “I am loyal person,” he says. “I’ve been to the Wales camp and made friends. It would take quite a lot now to change my decision.”
Wales have been down this road before, with mixed results. More than 30 years ago they went as far as picking a teenaged Stuart Barnes on the bench for an end-of-season uncapped fixture on the reasonable assumption that the Newport schoolboy would find their overture irresistible.
Barnes, born in Essex, resisted and Wales were left with a hole on their bench. A few years earlier they chose another bona fide Englishman, Colin ‘After-Shave’ Smart on the basis that the Newport loosehead qualified on residential grounds.
Smart took a few days to mull it over and politely decline the offer, a decision which put him off on the rocky path to that banquet in Paris where he downed a pint in one unaware that a team-mate, the late Maurice Colclough, had poured a bottle of after-shave into it. Emergency stomach-pumping ensued at the nearest hospital.
England, of course, have never been averse to snaffling the odd Welshman, most notably Dewi Morris. A farmer’s son from the Black Mountains of Powys, Morris found himself the object of all sorts of insults from compatriots accusing him of high treason.
It was nothing of the sort. Once he finished at Brecon High School, Morris played all his rugby in England – Alsager College, Winnington Park, Liverpool-St Helens and Sale. He had never appeared on any Welsh radar system when the neighbours picked him in 1988.
The scenario facing the youngest generation of players in today’s professional game could hardly provide more of a contrast to the amateur era of Morris. Sheedy is not the only Welsh youngster to opt out of the U20 squad, even if he is ranked third behind 19-year-old Dan Jones, of Carmarthen Quins, and Jarrod Evans, 18, from Pontypridd.
Another 18-year-old from the same town, Rory Bartle, has also opted for keeping all options open. Perhaps ominously for Wales, the back-row forward has enrolled at Gloucester’s academy and attends their prolific nursery, Hartpury College, on a scholarship.
Another Welsh back-row forward, Ross Moriarty, took the same route out of Wales and into England’s Junior World Cup-winning team in New Zealand last year. While he qualifies on the three-year residency rule, there is a strong case to be made for every country, not just England and Wales, to invest in its own genealogical department.
