Inside Shoulder
Nathan Sharpe (72)
For domestic rugby the age grade of young England players is determined by their age at midnight on 31st August at the beginning of each season.
But at the U/17 and U/18 elite level, only, the player's age grade is determined by their age at midnight on 31st December.
Thus the England lads who played Oz Schools would have been classified as U/18 the same as our guys were. When their school year ended was irrelevant.
This puts the Pom lads in step with IRB classification of U/20s down the track.
I don't doubt that this is the same for other countries in Europe because it enables the core of their national elite youth teams to stay together for elite age-grade competitions against each other.
This culminates in the 6N U/20 competition from which the IRB U/20 squads are chosen.
What is the solution? The solution is to get games against U/18 players who are schoolboys, as the Leinster and Munster matches will be.
There is one problem with that—such a tour will not benefit the host unions who run the elite youth programmes.
To tack on something that is outside the scope of their annual U/17 and U/18 routines once every four years, adds no value to their programmes; so they won't provide such schoolboy opponents at the "test" level as they used to back in the day. Times have changed.
I can't see a real solution. We could scrap the schoolboys idea and send an U/18 team over whether they are schoolboys or not.
That idea is anathema to me, and since the boys who had left school already wouldn't have been attached to an Academy for a couple of years as the Poms lads were, anyway, it would scarcely make a difference.
I suppose that we could avoid countries that don't provide school teams. Since we did get schools games against Leinster and Munster, we should do some extra work get other "midweek" games, and some school test games even if they are in France or Italy, or in 2nd tier countries.
The ASRU has no leverage in these matters so the ARU should help them, although, truth be told, they would rather use the England system.
Surely something could be arranged a year in advance, in the back rooms, by our ARU officials when they attend IRB meetings.
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We have only 4 franchises who offer virtually fully professional rugby. Only exceptionally talented schoolboys (Beale, QC (Quade Cooper)) make the immediate transition into any of those systems.
They have more than that in or very close to London alone - and they start them at 16.
There is no way the ARU could afford to run an operation anything like that from age 16, let alone any of the state unions. And in England these are merely clubs - clubs with money. Clubs who can sell out Twickenham for a dreary game of 10 man rugby.
And the more bitter fact is that we do not have the cattle to do it.