An interview with: Rob Andrew

By Joshua Davis

Rob Andrew is a man who seems to have been multitasking his whole career. At Cambridge he was a blue not only in rugby but cricket; when rugby union turned professional in 1995, he continued playing, while also taking on the manager’s job with Newcastle. Now, as the RFU’s Director of Elite rugby, a role he describes as ‘almost like being managing director of professional rugby’, he is yet again obliged to juggle. The position, created in 2006 when he was appointed, is as broad as the title, and the incumbent’s description, suggest: ‘I’m responsible for three key areas: player development, referee development and coach development.’ The three streams then diverge into their own wider currents:

‘The big focus is on the England team, but it’s a very small part of what I do. The England Under-18 team is as important to me as the England senior team.’ Yet Andrew does not consider the role to be too wide ranging: ‘it’s a management issue…It’s not too big a role, and all the parts are interlinked.’
Perhaps the biggest link of all is between the professional clubs and national team, one Andrew, who was Newcastle’s Director of Rugby for over a decade, was appointed to foster. As he puts it, ‘the key relationship is with the Premiership, and with all the academies…the key is ensuring the Premiership produce English players and high quality English players.’ He points to the England qualified players scheme, under which the RFU offers financial rewards for clubs fielding English players, and the funding offered to support the youth academies (‘the best they ever have been’). One job he does not have is selection: ‘Martin [Johnson] is the manager, he picks the squad and the team.’

For all that the role is wide ranging, it is England’s fortunes that dictate the public perception of any top level figure. On this front Andrew is hopeful, and credits England’s progress under Martin Johnson’s management: ‘we’re very pleased with how things are developing. It’s been hard, we’ve had to rebuild the whole side in a tough environment. Progress is being made.’ He points to England’s 21-20 victory in Australia in June, the first result of Johnson’s tenure to really buoy the spirits of long-suffering England followers. Keenly, he reels off a list of young players who have broken into the side over the last year – the likes of Ben Foden, Chris Ashton, Dan Coles, Ben Youngs and Courtney Lawes – a group finally injecting new purpose into what had become a tired rotation exercise among overly familiar faces. ‘We think we’re developing a squad of players, we’ve moved on quite a lot in the last six months. The Autumn internationals should give us a good idea of how close we’re getting to the Southern Hemisphere.’

As a player, Andrew enjoyed a glittering career, which began in Varsity rugby in the early 1980s. He recalls ‘some terrific memories. I went up to Cambridge at 19 and at the end of my first term was playing at Twickenham. It was fantastic…ask any of the players, it’s still a fantastic event, great occasion, enormous rivalry, and still one of the biggest moments in any rugby career, running out at Twickenham with your university mates…the experiences live with you for the rest of your life.’ At times the hard edge of his playing days rises to the surface of an otherwise equable tone; following another middling Six Nations campaign last spring, he was singled out for media criticism over a perceived lack of overall vision. Against his doubters he fires up: ‘absolutely there is [a vision], it’s easy for people to criticise from the outside who don’t know what’s going on inside. If you didn’t like criticism you wouldn’t be in this line of work and wouldn’t have survived as an international rugby player for ten years…there’s a lot of ill-informed criticism from people who should know better.’ Perhaps one of the hardest aspects of the job is the balance between putting in place structures for long-term development without ever losing sight of the next game: ‘‘you’ve always got to deal with the short term, medium term and long term. You’ve got to try and do them all. It’s a balancing act.’

The looming short-term imperative is next year’s World Cup in New Zealand; one question will be how success for England, 16/1 outsiders, is to be judged. Andrew admits that it is ‘difficult to answer. When you send an England team to a World Cup you hope to win it. I’ve been lucky enough to play in three World Cups and you go to try and win.’ So who is the RFU’s top man backing for the crown when the rugby world descends on New Zealand in just under a year’s time? ‘I don’t back favourites.’ It’s that stubborn streak England will need if they are to walk tall once again on rugby’s biggest stage.