Why Ugo Monye is helping to spread the play

While focus is on Twickenham’s all-Antipodean clash this weekend, former wing is part of a scheme that aims to get more rugby into state schools – and, who knows, might even help England reach another World Cup final one day

Ugo Monye and Marland Yarde talk the youngsters through the phases of play during a Premiership Urban Rugby Squad initiative (C1 Photography)

It was, in the end, a boarding school in Hampshire that calmly sent the ball high through the posts in the Sydney night. But the hands that nervously flung the ball back to it, and the great white wall that held back the marauding Australians to create the most crucial seconds in the history of English rugby, were almost entirely the beneficiaries of a free education.

Earlier, in the first half, those staccato feet of Jason Robinson that had accelerated all the way to the corner and over the Australian line had spent their formative years walking the pre-fab corridors of a failing Leeds comprehensive that has since been shut down.

That English rugby’s one great triumph was delivered by the most socially diverse collection of players it has ever had is possibly a coincidence. The entire front row, half of the second and two-thirds of the back had not troubled their parents’ pockets or some dubious scholarship programme for their rugby education. Nor had the scrum-half, the wings and one of the centres (ironically enough, the one who’s now married to the Queen’s granddaughter).

But here we are, a day before a Twickenham World Cup final where there can be little doubt that, 12 years on, English rugby has gone backwards faster than it did on its way into touch on the Welsh line at Twickenham 34 days ago.

But it’s not necessarily the case that rugby’s social base has narrowed in that time.

“Don’t forget, the majority of the 2003 team had come up through the amateur system,” says Steve Grainger, who is the Rugby Football Union’s development director.

“They didn’t grow up in rugby academies. Now, when kids go into a professional club academy, as part of that they will negotiate an independent school scholarship for them.”

It’s true. Such schemes have organised places for the likes of Billy Vunipola at Harrow School, a chap whose response to scoring the vital bonus point-securing try against Fiji was to announce that he didn’t actually know the World Cup had such a thing. Another great light, Jonathan Joseph, went to Millfield via similar means.

But despite England’s terrible showing in their home World Cup, the tournament’s legacy intentions, to get more rugby into state schools and more disadvantaged kids into rugby, will carry on, and already with some success.

A few days before Australia take on New Zealand, and one of them will win their third world title, teenage boys and girls are darting about on the pitch at Richmond College in the late afternoon sun, wearing the colours of the leading Premiership rugby sides, rugby tags dangling from their waists, the sheer concrete sides of Twickenham stadium towering above them.

Twelve weeks ago, all of the sides in the rugby Premiership, from London to Exeter and Leicester, recruited teenage boys and girls in their area from disadvantaged backgrounds to compete in the Premiership’s Urban Rugby Festival, spurred on by the overseers of the occasion, Ugo Monye and Marland Yarde, both England internationals, both from backgrounds untypical of the oval-ball game in England.

“A lot of these guys have got a lot of raw talent,” says Yarde, a 23-year-old from St Lucia who has five caps for England. “It’s up to them now to buy into sport and give themselves a chance of playing at a higher level.”

Yarde came to rugby via a scholarship at London’s independent Whitgift School. Like almost all top-level athletes, rugby was not the only sport in which he showed talent. “I come from the Caribbean, where it was more about cricket and athletics. When I moved to England I played football with Queen’s Park Rangers for a while. But at school I got into rugby. The core values – teamwork, respect and loyalty to your team-mates, I really bought into that. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to Whitgift School, where I broadened my rugby knowledge and was able to properly buy into the sport, and now I play at The Stoop week in week out [for Harlequins].”

Ugo Monye, now 32, was born in Islington to Nigerian parents. It is his talent for rugby that caused him, not so long ago, to be pulled over by police in his Range Rover in Richmond, the officers of the impression that he had stolen it. After his father abandoned the family when he was very young, his mother arranged a scholarship for him to attend Lord Wandsworth College (yes, that school in Hampshire), where he was the only black student in the whole school and a few years below a certain Jonny Wilkinson.

“I’ve seen rugby help kids, broaden their horizons,” he says. “This whole programme is about finding that hidden gem, the diamond in the rough. I was lucky. I didn’t go looking for rugby, it came about via school. Twenty years ago, when I first got involved, it was more than slightly elitist. We want to make it a game for all now.

“Today I am seeing girls and guys playing on the same team, allowing people from all different backgrounds, different races, on the pitch playing the game that we love.”

In the years leading up to England 2015, the Rugby Football Union has made much of its plans to use the tournament to get rugby played in 750 more state schools, which will mean that by the time Japan 2019 kicks off, half of the 3,200 secondary schools in the country are playing rugby, double the current number. Already, the “All Schools” programme has boosted the number by 400. But transforming the fortunes of the England first XV is not its immediate target.

“That’s not why we do it,” says Grainger. “It’s not an elite talent scheme. But I would be amazed if, in 10, 15 years’ time, there won’t be at least one member of the England team that hasn’t ultimately started out in this programme, who has come from a school that wouldn’t be playing rugby were it not for this.”

Eliminating the role of the private school is tough, and not even, ultimately, desirable.

“People look at the England team and think it’s independent school-dominated, but a lot of those kids have been to state schools and get a scholarship in sixth form. You’ve had the emergence of these scholarships for the age of 16. Kids are using sport as their marketing tool. That didn’t happen before,” adds Grainger.

“We just want to give everybody access to rugby posts, rugby balls, and a basic level of coaching. Outside of schools, we have to make sure the facilities at local clubs are up to scratch.

“Teenagers don’t want to come into a club that has paint coming off the walls, that has no wi-fi and looks like it has been lifted straight out of the 1970s or 1980s. That’s the reality we’re in.”

The miniature Harlequins had home advantage for the Urban Rugby finals and semi-finals, when the competition transferred from the playing fields of Richmond College to the more auspicious surroundings of The Stoop, but they lost 8-7 to Exeter.

“Anything that gets a rugby ball in people’s hands is amazing, spreading the good word of rugby is what we’re all about,” said their coach, Andrew Dudley. “Hopefully, these guys will have a rugby ball in their hands for many years to come.”

Hopefully, one of them, one day, might get their hands on the Webb Ellis Trophy.

BT Sport ambassador Ugo Monye and former team-mate Marland Yarde were speaking at a Premiership Rugby Urban Rugby Squad initiative, run with BT Sport’s The Supporters Club and the RPA’s Restart Rugby. A film will air on BT Sport 1 on Sunday. Premiershiprugby.com/UrbanRugbySquad.