Ian Ritchie comes out fighting England"s cause after another season of expert ...

“What we’re trying to do is say: we’re aiming to beat the best. So it’s a

perfect time to be going to New Zealand. We go with a confidence that we’re

capable of winning. It was a very close game against them here, and the acid

test is going there.

“It’s going back to the general theme of sustainability. If anyone has

achieved that, it’s New Zealand. I believe we have the resource, the

capability, of being better. If you look back over 30, 40, 50 years, we

should have done better.”

This is fighting talk, from a position of new strength. “The good thing is,

we’re fortunate in that economically we’re reasonably well set up to invest.

And in rugby terms we ought to be able to. Does it always work? No. But

we’re in a fortunate position of being generally well resourced. I think

you’ll see that opportunity for raising the bar all over the place.

“Sam Burgess [the recent recruit from rugby league] says, ‘I want to come and

play rugby for England’. Part of the quote was, ‘I want to sit in a

Twickenham dressing room for an England international’. Fantastic.

“I’m not saying that because he’s a rugby league player. Quite the opposite.

If you look at our current coaching set-up we have two rugby league

stalwarts [Andy Farrell and Joe Lydon]. I want people to feel we’re in a

good place.”

Rumbling on the horizon outside Twickenham is the 2015 World Cup, and here

Ritchie parades both the facilities already in place and the drive to

popularise rugby union outside its traditional heartlands.

Around 1,500 state secondary schools play the game and the RFU is pushing it

into 750 more, with an England team who are 13 parts state education and

only two parts fee-paying.

“There’s a wonderful four-minute video of Graveney School in Tooting. They got

to the semi-final of the NatWest Under-15 competition this year,” he says.

“Three years ago the school wasn’t playing any rugby at all. It’s a

comprehensive.

“Mike Brown spent some time with them. The impact of having the England

full-back come and spend time with them was great. In the video Mike says,

‘They’ve got a lot of gas’. Anyone can find one example. But the community

rugby stuff I think is enormously important.

“All of us focus a little bit on the England senior team’s progress. But what

you want is for everyone to look at that and say, ‘I want to give that a go,

they seem to be plugged in’. We’ve got to facilitate that, and we’ve tried

to get away from that old-fashioned idea of what rugby is like.

“I remember when we had an all-schools day here with Prince Harry. Jason

Robinson was fantastic. Jason Robinson and I were brought up half a mile

from each other in not exactly the best suburb of Leeds [Beeston].”

He will not take sole credit for the new European Rugby Champions Cup, but all

who took part in the negotiations says he was the king diplomat. “There were

a load of other people involved – Mark McCafferty, Bruce Craig, Bill

Beaumont etc,” he says.

“You’ve got to be terribly patient, try to persevere, and to say: what’s

the objective? Throughout the toing and froing of the European thing it

seemed pretty clear to me everybody thought the best objective was a

six-nation, nine-organisation competition.

“Then I said, ‘Are we really not going to do this for what are the

impediments? Are we not going to have this competition, which is hugely

important, because we’re having a disagreement about how we govern it?’

“Hell’s bells. It’s only 20 years since rugby went professional. What we have

to recognise is that balance between club and country. This is a club

competition. We had to find the right balance between the clubs and the

countries. We can’t stick our heads in the sand and say, ‘We don’t want the

clubs to be successful’, because of course we do.

“We were one of the few people round the table who didn’t have a financial

role. The clubs, quite rightly, get the money, so the RFU wasn’t affected in

the financial sense. We have to work the relationship between the RFU and

Premiership rugby.

“We want, together, the England rugby team to be successful, and English rugby

to be successful. We’re a big shareholder in Premiership Rugby. We get

things back from it – player access and so on – but the RFU are a

shareholder in PRL. It’s got an opportunity now to kick on.

“We want a successful European club competition with English clubs playing a

great role in it. I hope there is mutual respect. You can’t have that

separation. And if you speak to directors of rugby at the club about Stuart

and his coaching team I think you’ll hear them say they respect them, as

professionals.”

Twickenham itself meanwhile is transformed, for which Lancaster and his

players deserve most credit. Ritchie says: “The public are much more savvy

when they feel something is artificial or created. You’re never going to

force people to become staunch supporters or artificially create it.

“The first thing is the connection Stuart and the coaching team have with the

public. That’s earned. In this year’s Six Nations the two matches here were

phenomenal in terms of the support. And it’s going to be crucial for 2015.

“We changed the West Car Park around, made it more user friendly for people

who want to stay, put up a bandstand, made it easier to use the bars. When

you’ve got a stadium full of passionate people you don’t always have to ram

it down their throats.

“You just need occasionally to give it a bit of a push. We have 82,000 people

here. We haven’t had an arrest for years. Everybody sits together: Irish,

Welsh, Scots, Australian. The two Six Nations games were income records for

us. You get into that virtuous circle. The longer walk by the players to the

stadium was another thing. The effect on the players was really big.

“I spoke to Rio Ferdinand, Michael Carrick and Ryan Giggs when they came here,

and some of the stuff Rio was tweeting afterwards was lovely. David Beckham

came last autumn. You want people to think it’s a good day out.

“I think it’s great if people like Rio are saying, ‘My word, what the England

team are doing is something to be proud of’. We need to be broader as a

church. I think it’s very clear that you want that connection, and what

Stuart’s done, looking at the culture of the England team, is growing pretty

powerfully.

“It connects with the players and with the fans. He’s got a great team: Andy

Farrell, Graham Rowntree and Mike Catt. Andy, for example, is doing a

community club event tonight. Six hundred clubs pitched to have him. We’ve

had huge support from inside the England club in recognising their

responsibility to the community.”

A conversation like this at the RFU about peace on all fronts five years ago

would have been impossible. New Zealand is next. What could go wrong?

Article source: http://www1.skysports.com/rugby-union/news/19081/9245936/exeter-chiefs-to-sign-london-scottish-prop-tomas-francis

Ian Ritchie comes out fighting England"s cause after another season of expert ...