62 2GM Wednesday November 10 2021 | the timesSportRugby union
played for 50 minutes and did not
kick the ball once.
He has since developed a more
rounded game, but those creative
tendencies have been carefully
nurtured, in the RFU’s pathway
scheme by coaches such as John
Fletcher and Russell Earnshaw, and at
Harlequins by Nick Evans, the backs
coach and former New Zealand No 10.
“Growing up in Singapore, the
emphasis was probably on skill more
than it might have been over here in
his early days,” Earnshaw says. “But
he’s also got an incredible ability to
think for himself.
“We’d challenge him by putting
a target bib on him and giving the
defence extra points if they tackled
him. Or saying to him, ‘I bet you
can’t score a try with a cross-kickstrong age-group team with eye-
catching flair.
“He’s always had that skill, but it’s
the way he processes information so
quickly,” Buoy says. “He looks at
what’s happening in front of him and
sees it in slow motion. His ability to
solve problems was incredible.”
From an early stage, there was
always an instinct to attack, to bring
other people into the game, and this
was an attitude encouraged in the
Harlequins academy. Four months
after Jones had invited him to that
training session with England, by now
with A-levels in maths, politics and
business studies to his credit, he made
his first-team debut for Harlequins, in
September 2017, thrown in at the deep
end in front of 60,000 against
London Irish at Twickenham. HeF
or any teenager, sitting that
first A-level exam is a
daunting prospect and a
stressful process, the
culmination of two years of
hard graft, your future seemingly
dependent on your performance in
that examination hall. How to unwind
afterwards? Every sixth-former will
have their own ideas about how to let
their hair down, but Marcus Smith
had another important appointment
to keep.
He walked out of the exam hall at
Brighton College, swapped his school
uniform for his rugby kit, put in his
gumshield and ran out on to the
playing fields for a training session.
And this was not just any training
session. Still only 18, yet to play a
game of professional rugby, Smith let
off steam after his exam by taking up
an invitation from Eddie Jones to
train with the England team, who
were preparing for an end-of-season
game against the Barbarians at
Smith’s independent school.
“We had the conversation with him
beforehand: was he sure he could do
the exam and the training session?”
Nick Buoy, the school’s director of
rugby, says. “He was sure. He said,
‘Yep, I’m prepared for my exam, I’ll do
that, put it on the shelf, then get out
and train. I’ll be good to go.’ ”
A gathering of the best players in
English rugby then looked on with
amazement as Smith took his place at
fly half, lining up opposite George
Ford, and began organising the back
line around him. “It’s pretty crazy
when I think about it now, this kid
coming out of school to start training
with England,” Ryan Mills, the Wasps
No 12, who played outside Smith that
day, says. “His confidence for his age
was amazing, he seemed to know
exactly what he was doing, what he
wanted to do with the ball. You could
tell that he had something special.”
Fast-forward 4½ years and a full
house at Twickenham on Saturday,
when that something special was
witnessed by a broader sporting
audience for the first time. England’s
game against Tonga was Smith’s third
cap, after introductory appearances
against United States and Canada in
July, but he gave a clear indication
that he would be able to translate the
vivid playmaking exhibitions he had
given for Harlequins on to the game’s
grander stages.
Yes, this was against an
understrength and defensively
disorganised Tonga side, and much
sterner tests lie ahead, starting against
Australia on Saturday. But the try
Smith scored after coming on as a
second-half replacement, along with
the one he created with a quicksilver
dummy and pass to Jamie Blamire,
were enough to convince an England
crowd starved of recent excitement
that some good times may be
looming. As soon as Smith began
warming up and removed his
replacement’s bib on the touchline, a
sense of anticipation spread around
the stands.
All of which prompted Jones to
issue in public a cautionary tale to his
22-year-old fly half: that the fame and
attention heading his way would
come with hidden dangers of a “floodHype is nothing new for ‘rock
of distractions”. The way he delivered
the warning was clumsy, to say the
least, questioning the off-court
commitments that the young British
tennis player Emma Raducanu had
undertaken since her US Open
victory, but this was clearly a message
that the head coach wanted to issue
in strident terms.
And that protective instinct should
not be surprising, because Smith and
Jones go back some way, predating
the latter’s appointment as England
coach, and Jones does not want to see
a project in which he has taken such a
keen interest derailed, just as it is
coming nicely to fruition.
There was a slice of good fortune
about the first time that Jones
clapped eyes on Smith. Brighton
College had never hosted an
international team before and the
process of submitting a bid to become
a training base for the 2015 World
Cup in England was a daunting one.
“We nearly gave up a few times, but
we thought we’d go for it,” Buoy says.
The bid was successful and for three
weeks the school played host to
Japan, coached at the time by Jones.
It was in the week leading up to
Japan’s memorable victory over South
Africa in Brighton that Jones, looking
for a way to spend the evening with
his assistant coaches, was invited by
Buoy to watch the school’s first XV
playing against Sussex Under-18
under floodlights at Brighton RFC.“Eddie asked me when he got there if
there was anyone worth looking out
for,” Buoy says. “I told him the fly half
might be worth a look.”
It was a rain-soaked evening
and Smith, who was 16 at the time,
barely lasted until half-time, having
taken a head knock and been
withdrawn as a precaution. But Jones
had seen enough.
“It was after 20 minutes when he
nodded his head to me,” Buoy says.
“He said, ‘This kid can play.’ ”
Buoy himself had reached a
similarly swift conclusion during his
own first encounter with the young
fly half. Born in the Philippines, his
mother’s homeland, Smith had been
brought up in Singapore until, aged 11,
he travelled to attend a summer
rugby camp in Brighton, his father’s
home town.
“A friend of mine was running the
camp and he told me to watch this lad
who’s over from Singapore,” Buoy
says. “Before the session had started,
this lad ran past us. I turned to my
friend and said, ‘That’s him, isn’t it?’
Even at that age, just with the way
he moved, he had an aura about him.
Then I watched him play and he
was amazing.”
Buoy made contact with Smith’s
parents and was told that they were
intending to return to live in
Brighton. Smith was offered a
scholarship and his two younger
brothers, Luc and Thomas, would also
attend the school. With a natural
aptitude for whichever sport he
turned his hand to, Smith excelled at
cricket, football and rugby, leading aDAVID MCHUGH; TERESA STEPHENS; BOB BRADFORD/CAMERASPORT/GETTY IMAGES“
We’d challenge him by
saying, ‘I bet you can’t
score a try with a cross-
kick to Igor, the Russianprop.’ But he’d find a way
Marcus Smith's points ratio
Harlequins
(2017-)England U-18
(2017)England U-20
(2017–2019)England
(2021–)British & Irish Lions
(2021, tour game)Avg points per game9.7 1,09128594614113473178.415.314PointsGamesDespite his head coach’s
warning, England’s
Marcus Smith is not
one to get carried away,
finds John Westerby
England v
Australia
Twickenham Stadium
Saturday, kick-off 5.30pm
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