Bath bank on youth policy to bring back glory years

PAUL REES TALKS TO STUART HOOPER ABOUT BATH’S MOVE TO NURTURE HOME GROWN PLAYERS

When Bruce Craig bought Bath in 2010, at the time the wealthiest owner of a Premiership side, he vowed to bring back the good times to a club that had last won the league title in 1996, before the start of the Premiership.

“Bath Rugby is one of Europe’s elite clubs with a huge heritage and impressive past honours,” he said. “I hope to be able to combine my business experience and my passion for rugby to take this club to another level. My aim is for Bath to earn the right to be seen as one of the best clubs in professional rugby, a benchmark for others on and off the field.”

When Bath won the Courage League Division 1 in its final year, the first of the professional era, it marked their sixth title in eight years, a period in which they won the Pilkington Cup six times. They were never out of the top four after the introduction of leagues in 1987, but in the 25 Premiership years they have only made the top four ten times and twice flirted with relegation at the start of the century, finishing above relegated Bristol on points difference in 2002-03.

The two trophies they have won in the last 26 years were the Heineken Cup in 1998, when they overcame Brive in Bordeaux, and the European Challenge Cup ten years later when they defeated Gloucester at Kingsholm. They have twice made the Premiership final, in 2004 after they had topped the table by six points, and in 2015 when Saracens had all but won the match by half-time.

Shortly after Craig took over, Bath were in talks to sign the New Zealand outside-half Dan Carter. Although, unlike the owners of football clubs, he was unable to sanction unlimited spending because of the salary cap, in 2012 the Premiership allowed the wages of one marquee player to stand outside the cap, increased to two players three years later.

“I almost moved to England and had a few conversations with Bruce Craig when we met up in France and the deal was on the table,” said Carter. “I just had to say yes or no. I decided on France because it was more of a different culture to New Zealand.”

None of Bath’s starting line-up in 2015 had come through the club’s ranks. The wing Matt Banahan was the closest, joining as a 19-year-old second row from London Irish’s academy. They were all recruited and the more Bath watched the likes of Wasps, Leicester, Saracens and then Exeter enjoy periods of domination, the more they groped around for short-term fixes, with a heavy churn of coaches and players, and the more detached they became from the glory years.

Bath have spent the season at the bottom of the Premiership, without having to worry about the inconvenience of relegation, but there has been a sea change at the club. The policy now is to have a 50 per cent home grown squad by next year and a number of academy players have featured regularly in the Premiership this season, not least Orlando Bailey, who was chosen in the England squad this season, Max Ojomoh and Ewan Richards, the second row who turned 20 last week and has made ten league appearances this campaign while still in the academy.

“The promotion of home grown players is something we have done very purposely and with the backing of the owner,” said Stuart Hooper, Bath’s director of rugby. “It is something I strongly believe in and the intention is that they will be here for years. We will always attract some of the best players in the world, and rightly so, but there needs to be a core of players who have grown up in the city and know The Rec.

“I cannot tell you how special it is to give them their first jersey and their parents are there. Those things are so powerful for a team and a group of guys who want to to it together. We have had Orlando Bailey, Max Ojomoh and Ewan Richards, Miles Reid, Josh Bayliss, Tom de Glanville, Gabriel Hamer-Webb and Will Butt all appearing regularly this season. And there are more to come.

“Having a strong core of those people who not only can perform and push on to became internationals but who care very deeply about a club that means something to them is so important. Yes it is a professional organisation with people leaving and others coming in, but it is so much more than a job.

“There has to be a much deeper meaning. It cannot just be about getting paid at the end of the month and we are very fortunate in our pathway which is not just about developing athletes but people who care. They are more than rugby players to the supporters, Orlando is not just a number 10 playing for Bath or Miles a number 6, they are people and supporters connect with a person. It is important to get the blend right between home grown players and those you recruit.”

The 20-year-old Bailey has started 11 Premiership matches this season, benefitting from the prolonged absence of Danny Cipriani. Ojomoh’s total is 15, 13 in the centre and two at outside-half and the 21-year-old trained with England last summer. Richards is a second row whose pace has seen him deployed at openside flanker in four games this season, including the Heineken Champions Cup encounter away to La Rochelle.

“To play for your home town club, the one you supported as a boy, and to do so with your mates, there is nothing better,” said Richards, who played in the back row for England in this year’s U20 Six Nations. “I had always played rugby to enjoy it and never thought it would be a career. That came about from me doing quite well at the academy.”

A chronic injury list, followed by international calls, meant Bath had to play some of their emerging players more often than they had intended. The first ten Premiership matches were lost and the 11th, at London Irish, fell victim to the pandemic, but they won four and drew one of the next nine to leave them with more than an outside chance of defying what appeared their destiny, finishing at the bottom of the table.

“There needs to be a core of players who have grown up in the city and know The Rec”

“It is not about finishing bottom of wherever but giving the best version of ourselves every week,” said Hooper. “We believe that if we do that we will win enough matches to move up the table. It is a tough place to be when you are on a run of consecutive losses: winning builds belief and the return of our international players has provided an excitement we have to harness.

“We were unlucky at the start with the away games at Sale and Bristol coming down to tight calls. What is important when you have a run of results like that is to remain consistent and keep searching for the things that make you win. A victory gives you the boost of four or five points but more than that it is a reinforcement of what you do and the hard work that is put in.

“We understand that this season will not be one of our best wherever we finish, but we have stayed tight and determined and I am proud of the staff here. We want to make sure we do justice to everybody involved. That includes the supporters and I cannot speak highly enough of them.

“They have been incredible. One of the great things about this club is its connections to the city. You see it on game day, more than 14,000 people at The Rec whatever the weather. You feel it when you walk around the city and the encouragement and support they give every day is massive for us.

“The last two years have been disruptive with Covid and all the injuries we have had. What it has done is give a number of our academy players exposure at the top level. That is invaluable and will serve us for years to come. The team is made up of individuals who not just want to perform for Bath but to feel good about what they do and it is important that they go into the offseason with a good mindset.”

When Craig, who stood down as Bath’s chairman at the end of last year while retaining control of the dub, took charge in 2010, the Premiership’s salary cap was £4.15m. Now it is £5m, a figure that reflects the ravages inflicted on rugby’s already fragile economy by Covid, although it includes add-ons, induding credits for home grown players up to £600,000.

Nathan Hughes, the England No.8, last week returned to Bristol after a loan spell at Bath which was designed to give him time on the field after he lost his place at the start of the season to the 22-year-old Fitz Harding, a late bloomer who, when he went to Durham University, started in the fourth team and worked his way up, much like another No.8, Alex Dombrandt.

“It is strange to say, but it has been a phenomenal season for us,” said Pat Lam, Bristol’s director of rugby “It has been the worst results wise since I have been here, but it is potentially the best in the club’s history because of everything that is going on in our high performance centre and the growth. Fitz is an example of what happens when someone comes into the side and takes his opportunity.”

Those opportunities are becoming more plentiful because the drop in the cap means clubs have had to promote from within rather than re-sign players who are on the fringe of a matchday 23 and effectively insurance against injuries. All but one of the starting lineup for England’s final match in the U20 Six Nations against France featured for their clubs in the Premiership Cup the following weekend.

London Irish had five players in the U20s 23, including the 19-year-old full-back Henry Arundell, who has made four Premiership appearances this season. Two other members of Irish’s senior academy squad, lock Chunya Munga and flanker Tom Pearson, like Dombrandt an alumnus of Cardiff Met University, have been called up by the England head coach Eddie Jones.

It is open season on Jones following another underwhelming Six Nations campaign, but he has never been afraid to give youth its fling, as he showed when he coached in Australia and took a chance on the likes of Matt Giteau and George Smith.

Freddie Steward, Marcus Smith, Ollie Chessum, Nic Dolly, Bevan Rodd and Raffi Quirke were 22 or under at the start of the season but have all been capped during it, while Ollie Lawrence, Joe Heyes, Ted Hill and Dan Kelly all featured last summer. And England had the youngest squad in the 2019 World Cup.

Sale and Leicester have recruited heavily from South Africa in recent seasons, but they have also nurtured the likes of Steward, Kelly, Dolly, Heyes, Jack van Poortvliet, James Whitcombe, the Chessum brothers, George Martin, Quirke, the Curry brothers, Rodd, Ewan Ashman, Arron Reed and Curtis Langdon.

When Gloucester release their team before a match, they include an asterisk next to players who came through their academy. There were 14 in the starting line-up in the recent Premiership Cup match against Bristol and the likes of Ollie Thorley, Louis Rees-Zammit, Lewis Ludlow, Freddie Clarke, Jack Clement and Tom Seabrook are regulars in the first team squad.

Saracens have long grown their own, Wasps have not suffered after their move from west London to the Midlands, Exeter, Harlequins, Newcastle and Northampton have a crop of young players who have developed together, as do Worcester who for all their struggles in recent seasons have produced players like Hill and Lawrence.

“The problem will be balancing the books when academy players turn into internationals”

The problem for clubs will be, even when the cap goes back up, balancing the books when academy players turn into England internationals. A consequence of Jones rewarding youth is that the value of those players rises considerably in no time, think Maro Itoje and Owen Farrell in the past. One of the reasons Saracens looked to get round the salary cap in the second half of the 2010s was that there was not enough provision in it for players they had reared whose increase in status demanded hefty pay rises: up to £50,000 per player to a ceiling of £600,000 did not go far enough to cover it.

Halving the number of marquee players to one will free up funds, but that is likely to be a temporary measure. Going forward, it has to be worth it for clubs to produce young English players in numbers. Otherwise there is a danger of a repeat of the past when academy players graduated to senior rugby only for most of the non-exceptional to find themselves cast in the role of extras.

“The academy system is working,” said Bath back rower Nahum Merigan, the 20-year old England U20 international who has featured in the Premiership this season. It was not quite what Craig had in mind when he decided to blow some of his fortune on a sport he loved. He said at the time that it was a fallacy that success follows throwing a lot of money around. It has to be grown, a message the pandemic has rammed home..