Brendan Gallagher continues his series looking at rugby’s great schools
AS one of the northernmost bastions of schools rugby in England, RGS Newcastle are used to flying the flag for the Northumberland region and the side have been doing a pretty good job of that in recent seasons.
Last season they won 16 of their 22 matches and had designs on the Natwest Cup before slipping to a quarter-final defeat against a defiant Northampton School for Boys, who defended like tigers in the last 15 minutes to claim a famous win.
And the season before RGS were on fire, winning 19 of their 22 games and claiming a first ever title at the prestigious St Joseph’s Festival where they beat Millfield in the final to round off two intensive and memorable days of competition rugby.
That triumph at St Joseph’s – when 16 of the top schools in the country are invited to compete – was arguably the greatest rugby achievement in the school’s history or, at the very least, ranks with their appearance in the Daily Mail Cup final in 2010.
Ever since the days of former England coach John Elders, who was in charge of the school’s rugby for over 20 years, RGS have enjoyed a reputation of playing an all-court athletic brand of rugby with a small pack often having to compete against bigger forwards, but that has been reversed a little during the last two seasons as coach Andy Watt explains: “We don’t do sports scholarships at Newcastle so we tend to fluctuate a little from season to season depending on how strong a year group is, but over the last two seasons we have been blessed with two exceptional years combining to give us a particularly strong group who were a joy to coach.
“We had seven lads who have started for the Newcastle Academy at some stage of the season and that strength in depth is a rare luxury for a coach. We have another strong group coming through at U16 level as well who should peak in the 2021-22 season so these are good times at RGS.
“The most recent crop though wasn’t a typical RGS side! For once we have had a really strong set of forwards to work with and we have cut our cloth accordingly.
We had to adapt our normal approach “Props Phil Brantingham – who has already played for England U18 – and Mark Dormer potentially have big futures ahead of them and form the basis of a formidable pack with James Blackett working nicely off that platform at fly-half and kicking a lot of goals as well.
James is another Falcons Academy player.
“Historically I would say our 2009-10 team, which I helped Jim Pollock coach, was our best balanced XV in modern history – we reached the Daily Mail final that year before we ran into a Whitgift side with Elliot Daly and Marland Yarde! But this last season or two has definitely featured our strongest ever pack.
“The undoubted highlight was winning the St Joseph’s Festival the season before last when we beat Millfield in the final. St Joseph’s is a brilliant tournament, a wonderful rugby gathering, but obviously it’s pretty quickfire. The format is such that you can’t afford many mistakes, if any, and it favours the teams who can control the game and set pieces and the team who kicks their goals. That played to our strengths and it was an incredibly proud day for us to win against such quality opposition.
“We did it the hard way and beat some really strong sides along the way like Hampton, Brighton College, St Peter’s York in the pool, and then Denstone and Hurstpierpoint and Merchiston on the final day before Millfield.
“We also had high hopes of defending our title last season and were going well but, like I say, you can’t afford even one slip up and we lost our key game on the Sunday in our final pool match – in effect a semi-final – against an excellent Wellington side and that was our defence over. Again I was proud how we played, we backed it up from 2018 and showed that we were contenders again.
“Our two biggest local rivalries year in year out are, of course, Durham School, who we play at Kingston Park most years in our marquee game, and Barnard Castle. We hit top form beating Durham comfortably last season but they have some strong groups coming through their school and while there is absolutely nothing between us and ‘Barney’ at present we seem to have enjoyed the luck of the bounce in recent seasons and scraped through against them.
Last season was no exception, we won 14-12 at home and 19-17 away in a National Cup game.
Both matches were as close as the scoreline suggests.
“Although perhaps not a natural Sevens side we had so much strength and pace in our side this season – and experience in competitive situations like St Joseph’s – that we were hoping for a bit of a campaign down at Rosslyn Park. We won the Vase there in 2018 when we beat Felsted in the final and were targeting the ‘big one’ this time round. We were looking pretty decent in the build up –we were the only team to beat Barnard Castle in any competition when we pipped them at the Ampleforth final – but alas in the end we all lost out to Covid. It was going to be some tournament this year.”
One of the most important figures in the school’s rugby history is Elders, a Loughborough PE graduate and centre at Leicester, who served as the head of rugby between 1957 and 1982. Early on during that reign he still played senior rugby for Northern while midway through he became one of England’s first coaches. More than that he masterminded famous away wins against South Africa at Ellis Park in 1972 and then New Zealand in 1973.
Almost uniquely for the era, Elders was respected by the England players who usually had good reason to distrust selectors and coaches. Certainly England’s captain John Pullin always insists much of the credit for those notable away wins against southern hemisphere opposition should go to Elders.
Elders was a dynamic influence at the school where he taught maths, organised the annual prize giving, Founder’s Day and carol services. He also breathed life into Old Novocastrians – the old boys’ club attached to the school – finishing his playing career with them and then directing a conveyor belt of very decent schools players to the clubs to continue their careers with the Old Boys. On retiring he moved to Australia for a few years and teached at Toowoomba where one of his sides had five future Wallabies, including Tim Horan.
Another revered figure at the school is the recently retired Jim Pollock, the former Scotland wing who learned his rugby at the feet of Elders while a student at RGS between 1968 and 1977. Pollock famously scored the late try that earned Scotland a draw against New Zealand in 1983, in fact he became something of a lucky mascot for the Scots. He scored on his debut in 1982 when Scotland played brilliant to win in Cardiff and he was again present in 1983 when Scotland claimed their last win at Twickenham.
A policeman for much of his career Pollock switched to teaching and served at the school from 2002 until his retirement last year. His time in charge coincided with the schools appearance at the 2010 Natwest final –when Joel Hodgson and Fraser Balmain were the team’s standouts –while Falcons stalwarts Will Welch and Matt Thompson also developed under his tutelage. Other proud products of the school are Dave Walder – currently the Falcons back coach – and former England wing David Rees and, going even further back, England fullback Jonathan Webb.
