Not long after Eddie Jones was appointed by England he called a meeting at the RFU to address the dearth of openside flankers. Publicly, he played down the need for a specialist No7 but privately he was lamenting their absence. “I might have said: ‘I can’t see any natural sevens in England,’” recalled Jones this week. Richard Hill, however, had been casting the net further afield.
England’s World Cup-winning flanker, now the team manager but at the time responsible for identifying and developing young players, was aware of Sam Underhill, a former under-18 national captain who had moved to Cardiff to study and join the Ospreys from Gloucester.
Steadily, his name has come into public consciousness but it is only now – with Underhill having agreed to leave the Ospreys early and join Bath this summer – that Jones is able to select him. Unsurprisingly, he has done so immediately, starting him against the Barbarians on Sunday where a promising showing is likely to lead to his first cap in Argentina.
“I remember having a meeting with all the under-age coaches and we went through all the players that were available and Hilly said: ‘You’ve got to see this bloke play.’ And he was right,” Jones said. “I went and visited him every three or four months, just to have a chat with him, just to see where he’s up to. I didn’t beg him to come back to England because he’s got to want to play for England. He did and it was just a matter of finding how he could do that in the best way. The Ospreys have been fantastic in this.”
Underhill is 20 but there is a degree of hype because he is, arguably, the type of player England have not had since Neil Back was alongside Hill. Comparably, there must be something in the water in Wales. Sam Warburton and Justin Tipuric, Underhill’s team-mate at the Ospreys, are their leading lights while further down the pecking order are Ellis Jenkins and Thomas Young. James Davies has not made the summer tour despite a magnificent performance in the Scarlets’ Pro12 semi-final win over Leinster.
England, until now, have opted for abrasive flankers under Jones – Chris Robshaw moving to No6 and James Haskell playing at No7 – to nullify the threat of players in the mould of Steffon Armitage or David Pocock. Armitage was unavailable to Jones but he does face Underhill for the Baa-Baas while Jones did not like what he saw in Matt Kvesic and Will Fraser – English options as specialist sevens.
Robshaw, who co-captains the side, will line up next to Underhill and knows a thing or two about wearing the No7 jersey for England. “Playing in a different league I hadn’t seen too much of Sam but he looks pretty strong, confident and wanting to get on the ball,” he said. “He’s a good addition to the squad.”
Eighteen wins on the trot would suggest Jones’s approach of “two six‑and‑a‑halves” worked but while England were without Haskell and Billy Vunipola against Wales during the Six Nations, there is no doubting they were dominated in the back-row battle and Ireland’s trio also came out on top in Dublin. So is Underhill the missing link for Jones and England? “He’s definitely going to add something to us but he’s just starting,” Jones said. “He is at the start of what is potentially a Test career so I expect him to do the fundamentals well, make his tackles, do his clear-outs and be a link player but he has impressed. He has got a nice mature way about him, he is a very hard worker off the field and he has made a really standout impression in his first few days here.
“Any kid who goes off and leaves a club in England when he is almost guaranteed a progression through, goes off to Wales, fights his way and gets into the Ospreys, has got something about him.”
It would be wrong to suggest Jones is pinning his hopes on Underhill. There are eight uncapped players starting at Twickenham on Saturday and a further seven on the bench, including Sale’s 18-year-old flanker Tom Curry, a late replacement for his twin brother, Ben. “They are going to be something if they stick at it, stick at the basics of their game,” Jones said. “They’ve got good work ethics, they love the game and they want to get better. We’ve turned up three in one batch.”
