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Four World Rugby U20 Championship 2024 sign off talking points
By Liam Heagney
The rugby page turns quickly in South Africa. No sooner was the World Rugby U20 Championship over did attention turn to the aspirations of their men’s and women’s sevens teams at the Paris Olympics, while the Test rugby focus was swiftly onto The Rugby Championship and the impending new rivalry of Rassie versus Razor.
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Johannesburg on August 31 will be the first time that South Africa and New Zealand will clash in the professional era with former professional Test-level players at the helm and you can be sure that Erasmus and Robertson will play their part in feeding that particular hype machine.
We can’t sign off on Cape Town 2024, though, without properly reflecting on what the latest edition of the pinnacle international age-grade tournament all meant. Here are the RugbyPass talking points following a Championship deservedly won by the impressively well-drilled England:
The England RWC 2027 intrigue
Rugby World Cup 2027 in Australia is three years away and it will be intriguing how many of Mark Mapletoft’s 2024 World Rugby U20 Championship England title winners will get the chance to be involved in that campaign under Steve Borthwick.
It was 2016 when the English were last crowned champions at the age-grade Championship, Martin Haag’s team defeating Ireland in that year’s final in Manchester. That matchday 23 spawned 10 Test players, eight for England and one apiece for Wales and Italy, but only one – Jack Singleton – made it to Rugby World Cup 2019 in Japan and he didn’t kick on from there.
Instead, it was the 2023 edition in France when Max Malins, Joe Marchant (a 2019 selection near-miss), Will Stuart and Jack Willis were fully seasoned and ready to be chosen by England at the global showpiece and the country-hopping Johnny Williams was also a pick for Wales.
Will Mapletoft’s class of 2024 be quicker developers at adult-level international rugby? The rapid acceleration of 2023 U20s graduate Chandler Cunningham-South into Borthwick’s Test side is an example that the current senior team coach isn’t daunted by the risk of giving youth its fling.
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That attitude augers well for some of the great young talent that has come through on Mapletoft’s U20s watch, but the trick will be how quickly they can now make the breakthrough at their Premiership clubs.
Cunningham-South was way ahead of the curve in this regard when he arrived in South Africa in June last year for U20s duty off the back of a breakthrough year at London Irish that he then carried on at Harlequins last winter.
Unlike France, whose U20s team in last Friday’s final was littered with players who were regular club first-team starters in 2023/24, clubs in England are more risk-averse when it comes to blooding youngsters with a decent run in the team.
Only Asher Opoku-Fordjour and Ben Redshaw had proper, rather than fleeting blink-and-you-missed-it, first-team exposure last season.
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Hopefully, having World Rugby U20 Championship title winner inked on the CV will fast-track the progress of this England age-grade squad in the adult arena, with many players becoming Premiership regulars during 2024/25.
Unlike 2016’s title win and the 2019 Rugby World Cup, there surely has to be more than one 2024 player who will be part of Borthwick’s squad of 31 for Rugby World Cup 2027.
"I watched the first episode with the players last night…"
– Mark Mapletoft, with Liam Heagney ??, delivers the verdict on episode one of Embedded 2024, the fly-on-the-wall RugbyPass TV documentary on England U20s in Cape Town. #WorldRugbyU20s #EnglandRugby #ENGvARG #rugby pic.twitter.com/sZ3V5iLznQ
— RugbyPass (@RugbyPass) June 27, 2024
Genius of Mark ‘the smooth operator’ Mapletoft
Walking out from his Zoom post-game media conference following the final in Cape Town, the grinning England coach Mapletoft chuckled to the cameras in an upstairs room at the DHL Stadium, “Whose idea was it to permit a behind-the-scenes documentary crew to follow the squad around during their four-week campaign in South Africa?”
It was, of course, Mapletoft himself. As much as he gets how to handle the breed of teenagers on the modern-day England age-grade scene, kids who are very differently wired from 15 years ago when he was previously involved in a World Rugby U20 Championship final, the 52-year-old also very much gets the modern-day media.
Rugby’s growth around the world in the men’s game had been shackled by too many of its coaches and players adopting a say nothing/don’t engage approach over the years, but Mapletoft is cut from a very different cloth.
As a player, he even spent some time working at The Racing Post in London in the early noughties to get a feel for life outside rugby, and this inquisitiveness with the bigger picture hadn’t been dulled by his many years since coaching in the sport, including at first-team level in the Premiership with Harlequins.
Mapletoft’s dealings with the media as England U20s boss have been exemplary since he took charge in an emergency in May 2023. He has generally been insightful, courteous and, most importantly, if something is wrong, he doesn’t skulk in the background and hold a lingering grudge. Instead, his grievance is quickly passed on, a solution found, amends made and that is the end of the matter with no negative carryover.
It’s classy straight-shooter behaviour that so many others could learn so much from. This ability to speak up for himself in a proactive manner was a reason why he had no qualms about allowing RugbyPass TV to film Embedded, the documentary on England at the U20 Championship.
England and France, the Championship’s finalists, were the two overseas participants at the U20s tournament in South Africa who were by far the best with the media, even having in-house PR on the ground with them in Cape Town. They knew the score and were brilliant facilitators in allowing profile/publicity to be built about their teams, especially on the RugbyPass website. Very well played.
Cherishing rugby the South African way
RugbyPass can attest to how much locally-based South Africans cherish their rugby. This popularity was highlighted when we attended the atmospheric two-Test Springboks-Ireland series in Pretoria and Durban. So too watching the Springboks-Portugal game from Bloemfontein at a packed Hamilton RFC clubhouse in Cape Town last weekend, which even had a touring Welsh club on-site for the evening.
This type of enthusiasm for the sport also meant that South Africa was a great host for the 2024 Championship. Just check out the online footage of the celebratory reception the England squad received when they returned to their hotel after they had beaten France in the final.
It was a spontaneous South African outpouring of joy that was lovely to see and the English were very thankful for it. Plentiful accommodation within a small radius was one reason why the Championship was held in the same place for a second year in succession, the first time there was a back-to-back repeat host for the tournament.
Admittedly, the winter weather in the Cape region was difficult, none more so than on match day three when one game was cancelled and another abandoned at half-time, but the iconic DHL Stadium was a perfect semi-final and final stage and all six matches played there on July 14 and July 19 were top class spectacles.
What was noticeable at the Championship was how well-beaten teams kept playing until the final whistle. Take match day five; both Wales and Ireland enjoyed flourishes in the closing 10 minutes of their respective losses to South Africa and New Zealand that produced some lovely scores, while France’s last-play consolation against England in the final was also beautifully executed.
There are too many occasions in adult rugby where well-beaten teams give up and the scorelines become damning. That heads-down surrender doesn’t happen at U20s level and it’s why a full 80 minutes is always watchable.
Players at this level don’t die wondering. Instead, they give it a lash until it’s all over and that chutzpah is to be cherished. The pity is this refusal to go quietly into the night gets coached out of too many players in the adult game.
Time to ‘leg-up’ the minnows
The legacy of the 2023 World Rugby U20 Championship after three northern hemisphere teams and just one southern hemisphere team reached the semi-finals was that the south’s big four decided to stage an inaugural age-grade Rugby Championship in May that even had a Championship-like five-day turnaround between the games.
Its genesis was to give the southern hemisphere teams a preparation comparable to their northern counterparts who have the Six Nations every year as its runway into the World Cup.
The outcome? The same three-to-one north-south semi-final split, the only difference being that it was New Zealand, and not South Africa, who joined England, Ireland and France in the knockout stages on this occasion.
Eventually finishing third was New Zealand’s best finish at the Championship since they were champions in 2017. Encouragingly for them, they pipped France in a pool encounter and Ireland in a play-off, but they were hammered by the French in their semi-final rematch with a calibre of high-tempo, attacking rugby that simply blew them away.
Another southern downside was the failure of South Africa to make the last four. It was just the second time since the tournament started in 2008 that the Junior Boks were eliminated in the pool stage.
It must be said, though, that Argentina were excellent after their opening-round loss to England, but their three big wins came against their southern rivals South Africa (twice) and Australia.
Despite the repeat three-to-one hemisphere semi-final split, The Rugby Championship will surely become a great development tool for future World Championships. The question that must be asked, however, is how to better assist the teams not in the Rugby Championship and the Six Nations get ready for the Championship.
Without TRC involvement, winless Fiji’s soft underbelly was repeatedly exposed and it culminated in their relegation to the Trophy, while Spain and Georgia, who respectively had one and three wins in South Africa, have no Six Nations participation to help them develop before trying to be decent again at the 2025 Championship.
Expansion of the TRC and 6N in some way to assist these countries currently not involved would be a fantastic initiative to see adopted. Games will always be the best way to develop age-grade players, not training, so an appetite must exist to find a mechanism to further enhance across-the-board standards.
- Click here to sign up to RugbyPass TV for free highlights and full match replays of all the games from the 2024 World Rugby U20 Championship
“Unlike France, whose U20s team in last Friday’s final was littered with players who were regular club first-team starters in 2023/24, clubs in England are more risk-averse when it comes to blooding youngsters with a decent run in the team.”
This is always spoken of as a negative, but I’m not so sure. Players that age can really benefit from extra minutes in the gym, which can be hard when you have a big fixture every Saturday.
France have obviously brought through a massive number of young players in recent years, but international rugby has been dominated by Ireland and South Africa, who both tend not to give first team opportunities to players under the age of 25. Perhaps the lesson to draw is rushed development is the enemy of long term success.
Either way, I guess we’ll find out. If the current crop of French youth go on to do great things in 2027 the argument will be pretty settled.