The English coaching pool

The pressure on Stuart Lancaster and his coaching team had been growing following England’s exit from the Rugby World Cup and on Wednesday afternoon Lancaster announced he was stepping down from his position of head coach.

Even before the announcement, support for Lancaster and his lieutenants was thin on the ground and there were growing calls for England to look to the southern hemisphere for a coaching team to take them through to the next RWC in Japan in 2019.

It’s not a surprising reaction given the relative success rates of Lancaster, Martin Johnson, Brian Ashton and Andy Robinson in the job, but there’s a great crop of English coaches currently earning their stripes at various clubs and, unlike in previous years, there are genuinely exciting options across the spectrum of coaching positions.

Attack and/or backs

Northampton’s Alex King is a name which has been mentioned as a future England coach on numerous occasions over the past couple of seasons, while Mark Mapletoft has done a very good job at Harlequins over the years, working with a predominately English cast. Looking to the south-west and Ali Hepher has Exeter’s back line playing with skill and fluency, not to mention a great working relationship with the trio of Henry Slade, Sam Hill and Jack Nowell.

The standout may be Gloucester’s Nick Walshe, however, who is not only revolutionising the Cherry and White’s attack, but who also masterminded England’s two Junior World Championship victories in 2013 and 2014. Those two squads played a devastating and balanced brand of rugby and should form the core of the England senior squad moving forward, making Walshe a potentially huge asset to England.

Skills coaches often come in under the umbrella of attack and Collin Osborne and Joe Shaw are two individuals certainly worthy of mention, as is one Jonny Wilkinson. England’s former golden boy has been cutting his coaching teeth down at Toulon and would undoubtedly offer plenty of positive impact as a kicking coach initially, but with potential to branch out into either attack or defence as well.

Defence

England are rarely short of home-grown defensive coaches and have even exported talented individuals such as Shaun Edwards and Dave Ellis in the professional era. England’s defence has gone awry over the last year but there’s talent enough in the playing personnel to make the position a very sought-after job.

Joe Worsley has been doing a sterling job with Bordeaux-Bègles in the Top 14 and Raphaël Ibañez’s snub for French head coach could make Worsley very amenable to a return to English rugby, while Harlequins’ Tony Diprose is a coach who doesn’t receive the widespread recognition that he deserves.

As with the attack coaches, there does seem a fairly obvious standout and it comes in the form of Saracens’ Paul Gustard. Not only does Gustard like to implement a high intensity, blitzing defence, which England had previously excelled in utilising, but he also has experience with England, having been part of their tour to Argentina during the summer of 2013. Saracens may not be everyone’s favourite team, but the ‘Wolf Pack’ culture instilled by Gustard has been one of the keys to their success and makes them one of the best defensive teams in the world.

Forwards

English rugby has always prided itself on its forwards and that is mirrored in the number of quality coaches currently plying their trade in the Aviva Premiership. Northampton’s Dorian West, Gloucester’s Trevor Woodman and Bath’s Neal Hatley are all fine forwards and/or scrum coaches and more than capable of adding to the great work that Graham Rowntree has done during his tenure with England.

Of course, England would be in an equally promising position if they retained Rowntree. The English scrum was in an awful state at the RWC, but the loss of Dylan Hartley shouldn’t be underestimated in contributing to that sorry state of affairs. With Hartley flanked by Joe Marler and Dan Cole in the 2015 Six Nations, the English scrum gave up the least penalties of any side in the competition, as well as drawing the most from opposition teams.

More concerning should be the struggles England endured at the contact area, particularly with the rucking of their pack, and it may be time for England to have separate forwards and scrum coaches. This would open the door to Saracens’ Alex Sanderson or Bristol’s Steve Borthwick. The latter did a wonderful job with Japan in the RWC, while the former has the Saracens’ pack playing like a well-oiled machine week in, week out.

Head Coach

Lastly we come to the most important position of all, the head coach. A host of Premiership head coaches have distanced themselves from the job, including Dean Ryan, Rob Baxter and Mike Ford, but that was when Lancaster was still in the position of head coach. In addition to the three mentioned, Jim Mallinder, Steve Diamond and Dean Richards have also been mooted as the speculation abounds as to who might take England through to 2019.

England’s technical deficiencies at this past RWC make Ryan, who is a very tactically astute and technical coach, an appealing target, but whether or not his attitude to the position has changed since it became available is anyone’s guess. Baxter, Ford and Mallinder have all reiterated their loyalty to their current clubs and desire to see out their contracts, but responding to speculation is a different prospect entirely to actually turning down a job offer from the RFU.

It’s certainly true that there were more suitable foreign candidates for the England job when the RFU hired Lancaster, Johnson and Ashton, and that their patriotism may have been detrimental to English rugby in those instances, but that doesn’t mean the same is necessarily true now. 

None of those English candidates have the experience of an Eddie Jones, Jake White or Wayne Smith, but all three of those foreign coaches are currently contracted elsewhere. There’s little doubt that the RFU could easily buy out their contracts, but is that the best move for English rugby?

This is arguably the best crop of English coaches of the last decade and there should be no rush to employ a southern hemisphere coaching team as a knee-jerk reaction to an incredibly disappointing World Cup campaign.