It’s starting to feel like a Northampton Saints takeover, with the reigning Premiership champions providing 15 of the 65 players in the England senior and A squads this week, far exceeding the average if all 10 clubs were evenly represented.
The quartet of smiling faces in a celebratory photo after England’s much-needed win over France told the story: Alex Mitchell, Fin Smith, Tommy Freeman and Ollie Sleightholme – four backs from one club, Northampton, together for their country.
Then you remember Northampton full-back George Furbank is injured, otherwise it might have been five starters out of seven in the England backline. And what about centre Fraser Dingwall, who is also in the England squad, or wing George Hendy, who is in line to play for England A this week, with Northampton youngsters Rafe Witheat and Billy Pasco for company in that second-string squad?
There are ups and downs to this tale of successful Saints, as we’ll see, and England head coach Steve Borthwick has never explicitly stated a policy of picking from one club – although he recently cited Leinster’s amazing cohesion for Ireland, and how Saracens’ serial winners at club level helped England to the 2019 World Cup final, and England leant on the successful Leicester Tigers and Wasps teams of the 2000s: “Guys who were just driven to win.”
Undoubtedly, the current Northampton effect on England is buoyant, and the players are forthright about the advantages of a ready-made understanding.
England’s winning try against the French two weeks ago was finished on the wraparound by Saracens’ Elliot Daly, but it was a move very familiar to Northampton supporters, and called by Smith as the fly-half. The earlier try made by Smith’s lofted cross-kick to Freeman could conceivably have been brought off by Harlequins’ Marcus Smith, but the Northampton pair have the empathy of around 60 club matches together.
🏉 @sageuk Play of the Round 💪 Alex Mitchell throws a 8m pass at 34.6kph to Fin Smith who changes direction to send the 23.5m cross-field kick to Tommy Freeman who catches it after a 2.7s hangtime to score the try for England 🤩#SageInsights pic.twitter.com/LrOlXjAPao— Guinness Men's Six Nations (@SixNationsRugby)
As Freeman said afterwards: “I knew he was going to hit that cross-field kick, I know the way he moves, the timing he wants off you, whereas with Marcus it’s a bit different.
“Connections are the most important thing in a team. The likes of me playing with Fin, Ollie and Mitch, week in, week out, makes it that little bit easier. There are cues I can pick up that probably a lot of lads can’t.”
Fin Smith agreed, saying: “I know Tommy’s strength is largely off my shoulder or on the touchline. I know which areas he and Sleightholme are going to pop up in. When you haven’t played with someone so much it’s, ‘Is he going to come on my inside, deep behind me, or flat on my shoulder’?
“I have played 50-odd games with [scrum-half] Alex Mitchell, spent a lot of time talking to him about how we see the game. In the last 25 minutes when we had to make some fairly big game-management decisions, having him out there with me made a massive difference and took a bit of weight off my shoulders.”
Past England squads suffered from cliques of club players hanging around together, worsening not improving the camaraderie. Borthwick has no rule on mixing players up when they are rooming at the England team hotel.
Freeman is with Mitchell this week, while other pairings are based on position or longevity: Jamie George and Daly, Marcus Smith and Ollie Lawrence, Ellis Genge and Luke Cowan-Dickie, and so on. It’s in team meetings where captain Maro Itoje will emphasise the necessary one for all, all for one approach.
Still, Freeman is happy joking about how his Northampton “bromance” with best pal Smith gets on the nerves of their girlfriends, and it is a topic of affectionate mickey-taking among teammates.
“I’d done a bit of [England under] 20s training with Fin,” Freeman recalled. “He was in the year below me. I’d put an arm round him when he came to Saints as a young lad playing 10. We’ve spent a lot of time together, and us Saints lads all live pretty locally, within 10 minutes of each other and some are walking distance.
“We see each other every day at training but we want to spend more time with each other afterwards as well. We are always going over for dinners, and those things we do together off the pitch like our recovery at Virgin Active and all the health clubs. It’s all pretty local at Northampton.”
So when Furbank says of Sleightholme, “he’s an angry man – you don’t want to get on the wrong side of Sleights. If you throw a few digs at him, he’s going to go for you”, you know it comes from a background of comradeship.
A club concentration in a national team is not uncommon. Sixteen of the Ireland 23 who beat England in the first round of this Six Nations were from Leinster. There were nine Toulouse players in the France 23 at Twickenham. Two natural club-country cores are Scotland/Glasgow Warriors and Italy/Benetton, while New Zealand’s autumn series team was spread between their Super Rugby sides, Australia’s 15 had six starters from the Waratahs, and it was the same for South Africa with the Sharks.
So how does Northampton’s director of rugby Phil Dowson feel about it? The i Paper saw a Saints side of senior and academy players win 66-33 in the Premiership Cup at Nottingham last week, and the club’s style was evident: structure combined with seizing the moment in sharp, straight running.
Afterwards, Dowson said: “These lads, when they come through the academy or we sign them, we talk about their ambitions, and one of those is to play international rugby.
“We’re incredibly proud of how they’re representing us, and we’ve got lots of guys on the fringes of England too – Alex Coles is back from injury now, and those players going into the A game. Our pathway is based on development, and to see those guys step up and do it on the world or the national stage is fantastic.”
And can they bring the cohesion of eight weeks with England back to the club?
“Yeah, big time,” said Dowson. “All experiences are good experiences, poor or good. Those lads being in that environment will come back with a different mindset, with different experiences, from beating the French, from losing to Ireland; that cohesion just doesn’t go away. Tommy Freeman is still going to be very closely connected to Fin Smith, and that can only be a positive thing.”
But it’s not all upside. Northampton are down in eighth place in the Premiership, and Dowson is unhappy they were “shorn of players” when they lost away to Bristol Bears in October and Harlequins in January at the same time as England had training camps.
“People might look at our league position, but we’re playing hamstrung a little bit by the number of players away,” Dowson said. “They can talk about a de-conflicted calendar – it’s not, although it’s better than it used to be. We take the positives, and we try and nail how we can get better at it.”
It’s not as if the Northampton cohort all arrived at the same time in the same place, like some kind of rugby Midwich Cuckoos. The England contingent are aged from 22 (Smith) to 28 (Furbank), and some had development time elsewhere – Freeman at Leicester, Mitchell at Sale Sharks, Smith and Hendy at Worcester Warriors – while Coles, Dingwall, Furbank, Henry Pollock and Sleightholme have only ever played for the club.
But according to the recent ex-Saint, and club legend, Courtney Lawes, in The Times, they were all encouraged “to understand from an early age the benefits of taking responsibility for their own preparation and ownership of the games”.
Following the theory through, you wonder if Northampton head coach Sam Vesty could be the next cab arriving on the England rank, as he has already coached the A team temporarily. But that’s a question for another day.
Forwards:
Fin Baxter (Harlequins)
Ollie Chessum (Leicester Tigers)
Alex Coles (Northampton Saints)
Luke Cowan-Dickie (Sale Sharks)
Chandler Cunningham-South (Harlequins)
Ben Curry (Sale Sharks)
Tom Curry (Sale Sharks)
Theo Dan (Saracens)
Alex Dombrandt (Harlequins)
Ben Earl (Saracens)
Ellis Genge (Bristol Bears)
Jamie George (Saracens)
Joe Heyes (Leicester Tigers)
Ted Hill (Bath Rugby)
Maro Itoje (Saracens)
George Martin (Leicester Tigers)
Asher Opoku-Fordjour (Sale Sharks)
Henry Pollock (Northampton Saints)
Bevan Rodd (Sale Sharks)
Will Stuart (Bath Rugby)
Tom Willis (Saracens)
Backs:
Oscar Beard (Harlequins)
Elliot Daly (Saracens)
Fraser Dingwall (Northampton Saints)
George Ford (Sale Sharks)
Tommy Freeman (Northampton Saints)
Ollie Lawrence (Bath Rugby)
Alex Mitchell (Northampton Saints)
Harry Randall (Bristol Bears)
Tom Roebuck (Sale Sharks)
Henry Slade (Exeter Chiefs)
Ollie Sleightholme (Northampton Saints)
Fin Smith (Northampton Saints)
Marcus Smith (Harlequins)
Ben Spencer (Bath Rugby)
Freddie Steward (Leicester Tigers)
Forwards:
Alfie Barbeary (Bath Rugby)
Phil Brantingham (Saracens)
Richard Capstick (Exeter Chiefs)
Greg Fisilau (Exeter Chiefs)
Mackenzie Graham (Bath Rugby)
Luke Green (Northampton Saints)
Tarek Haffar (Northampton Saints)
Jack Kenningham (Harlequins)
George Kloska (Bristol Bears)
Curtis Langdon (Northampton Saints)
Tom Lockett (Northampton Saints)
Gabriel Oghre (Bristol Bears)
Tom Pearson (Northampton Saints)
Guy Pepper (Bath Rugby)
Hugh Tizard (Saracens)
Backs:
Charlie Atkinson (Gloucester Rugby)
Will Butt (Bath Rugby)
Joe Carpenter (Sale Sharks)
Tobias Elliott (Saracens)
Ollie Hassell-Collins (Leicester Tigers)
George Hendy (Northampton Saints)
Josh Hodge (Exeter Chiefs)
Max Ojomoh (Bath Rugby)
Billy Pasco (Northampton Saints)
Will Porter (Harlequins)
Jamie Shillcock (Leicester Tigers)
Jack van Poortvliet (Leicester Tigers)
Rafe Witheat (Northampton Saints)
Joseph Woodward (Leicester Tigers)
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