My week with Northampton was one of constant laughter... and a few haymakers (original) (raw)

Ever wondered what it is like behind the scenes at a Prem rugby club? We did too, and so for one illuminating week Telegraph Sport went into camp with the Northampton Saints.

This is what we found.

Monday: Welcome ‘Trent Crimm’

A queue of season-ticket holders is already forming outside the Cinch Stadium at Franklin’s Gardens as seats are released for Northampton Saints’ home play-off match. Inside the ground, Phil Dowson, the club’s director of rugby, is giving a tour to Telegraph Sport, which has been given an access-all-areas pass leading into Saints’ final regular-season match at Harlequins. As he explains to the assembled squad and support staff at a team meeting later that morning, the outside world sees barely five per cent of Northampton’s working week on a Saturday afternoon. By throwing the doors open, he is hoping to shine a light on the cogs that make the machine whirr on a match day.

The day started with a 7am coaches’ meeting. An hour later, strategy meetings begin with individual units around attack, line-out, scrum and defence. Sam Vesty, Saints’ head coach, leads the attack strategy meeting but spends as much time discussing various players’ Saturday night excursions as he does reflecting upon the 36-32 victory over Gloucester.

This is because the review has largely already taken place. On Sunday morning, Vesty sent a six-minute video to the squad via their Hudl application. He highlights how some sloppy work in their set-piece, plus training the week prior, fed directly into the performance, but also how their tries flowed from getting the basics right. “We have to do that better every day at training,” Vesty says. “We have to understand that is everything about our game. Nothing fancy. All f------ straight and very basic, but done very well and very fast.”

Saints forwards take part in unit-specific training - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

There are also sub-groups on Hudl. Videos of every scrum from several angles are shared among the front rowers, which leads to a flowing chat on the application with scrum coach Jaco Pienaar. This means that by the time the players arrive on Monday morning they know what went well and what did not. Vesty’s meeting lasts around eight minutes. He mainly asks questions of the players to reinforce the messages behind his video and then outlines a few launch-play tweaks for Harlequins.

After that, players wander in for individual meetings with coaches. Tom Pearson is talking to James Craig, the forwards coach, while Lee Radford, the defence coach, is using some uncompromising language in a discussion with Henry Pollock.

Lee Radford, Saints’ defence coach, sits down with players for one-to-one discussions - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

One of Dowson’s first acts when he succeeded Chris Boyd was to create an open-plan office so the coaching staff sit beside the analysts and academy team. It means there are always several conversations happening at any time. “It made no sense for people to be operating in silos, we wanted everything to flow like it should in our game,” Dowson says.

Unlike most clubs, Northampton train on site at Franklin’s Gardens. Dowson says the high-performance centre – or the Barn – which was opened next to the stadium in 2023, has been a game changer. Yet compared with the bells and whistles of Bristol Bears’ Abbots Leigh base, or Bath’s regal Farleigh House, they are far from the fanciest facilities in the league – although the grass is invariably immaculate. But Dowson believes the “emotional attachment” that Northampton gain from training on their home pitch outweighs any mod cons.

“There is a book about Eastern European tennis players who are training on courts with broken glass on them, but it is not about that,” Dowson says. “The facilities do not need to be all singing and all dancing. The big thing is it’s functional.”

Whether it is a conscious habit or not, Dowson is constantly picking up little bits of litter around Franklin’s Gardens. He loves the sense of history that pervades the ground, taking me into the Crooked Hooker pub, where only current and former players are allowed to drink and pointing out the plaque for the Blakiston Challenge, a pre-season physical challenge held in honour of Sir Arthur “Freddie” Blakiston, a First World War hero and former player.

The Blakiston Challenge honours board hangs proudly in the Crooked Hooker - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

At 10.40am, there is the team meeting, where I am introduced as “Trent Crimm”, the fictional reporter from the television show Ted Lasso. Despite frustration around certain aspects of their performance against Gloucester, Dowson pointedly reminds the squad that they have finished the season top of the table no matter the result against Harlequins. “That is an incredible achievement,” Dowson says. “If you think about where we set out on July 7 – and we are now [in] week 48 – if you said we are going into the play-offs, top of the table, having lost two league games all year... we should look at the bigger picture.”

After Radford awards his tackle of the week to Emmanuel Iyogun, letting the prop sign the “Clubber of the Week” plaque, Dowson announces his starting XV to face Harlequins. Several internationals have been left out, but Dowson emphasises the standards must not slip. “The result isn’t the most important thing, ever,” Dowson says. “Our performance, our attitude, our energy – that’s the most important thing. We’re going. Shackles off. Let’s see how good we can be on that day, but it is our preparation and our week that will see how good we can be.”

It was Emmanuel Iyogun’s turn to put his name on the Clubber of the Week board

Tuesday: Pollock on the wind-up

It is 8.45am and Northampton’s gym on the first floor of the Cinch Stand feels like it is shaking to the bass of Tommy Freeman’s workout playlist. Somehow the noise grows louder still as a group of players surround Alex Coles on the bench press where Pollock has convinced everyone that the England lock is attempting a personal best. He is not, but that does not stop the crescendo of cheers building around Coles. “That’s typical behaviour, he’s a little child,” Coles says. “We’ve got a weird relationship. He spends so much time winding me up.”

George Furbank pushes himself in the gym - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

At this stage in the season, very few players will be attempting personal bests, which are marked by the ringing of a small bell in the gym. As Josh Kemeny, the Australian flanker, says: “We’re all in varying degrees of pain.” In one corner, Freeman is doing one-legged, weighted calf raises. “Towards the back end of the season, it is lower reps, not as heavy,” Freeman says as he fills in his scores on an old-fashioned A4 piece of paper and clipboard.

All of this is overseen by Tom Bullough, Northampton’s head of performance – or “the fixer” as Vesty describes him – and a team of four strength and conditioning coaches whose roles go far beyond putting out dumbbells. “We will spend far more time with the players than the coaches will, so the relationship is quite different,” Jason Sivil, senior strength and conditioning coach, says. “The big difference is that the coach is often the one who has to make a really hard decision on a player, whether it is selection for the week or whether it is contractual. That’s not us. We tend to be more of a sounding board for players and almost let them unload at us at times. It is a fine line because you never want it to be a negative space, but you also want them to be more vulnerable with us.”

At 10.15am, there is a meeting of the game drivers for Harlequins. Oli Dixon, the team psychologist, starts the discussion about motivation, which is then led by the players. Technically there is nothing riding on the game for Saints, but as captain Fraser Dingwall forcefully points out that is because they have earned that right. “It is like we have a free crack at getting better, having fun and putting a hand up for further weeks,” Dingwall says. “That’s the excitement we can build around it and I hope that’s instilled through everyone and we push it out of the group.”

Telegraph Sport was given a rare access-all-areas pass during the week before Saints’ match against Harlequins - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

There follows another team meeting and then a units meeting. Although this might seem like any other office environment with meetings about meetings, Northampton’s rarely last more than 10 minutes. “Meetings are important but they quickly outlive their purpose if you lose the boys’ attention,” Vesty says. The presentations are also enlivened by video graphics and some arresting metaphors. In his line-out review, Craig shows videos of Northampton’s maul defence getting into excellent set-up positions against Gloucester but failing to finish the job. “What is the most venomous creature in the world?” he asks the group. “It is actually a daddy long legs, but it does not have any fangs so it looks dangerous, but it is harmless. So let’s not be a daddy long legs, let’s be one of those venomous things that kills people.”

Wednesday: Secrets to punching above their weight

This is a day off for the players, but there is a pointed reminder on their schedule of “how do you become a better player?” Work for many inside the club, however, does not stop. Paul Shields has been the club’s head of recruitment since 2011 and he has a steady stream of visitors in his small office next to Dowson’s.

A recently published salary-cap report by Prem Rugby showed that Saints were the third-lowest spenders in the league for the 2024-25 season, coming in at about £500,000 below the £6.4m cap. They would expect to be around the same position this season despite wage expenditure being one of the best predictors of league finishing position in any sport.

“We have been punching above our weight for a long time now,” Shields says. This summer, they will lose England full-back George Furbank to Harlequins as well as proven Prem performers Sam Graham, James Ramm, Elliot Millar Mills, Tom West and Tom James. The replacements are hardly like-for-like in terms of experience, with Lefty Zigiriadis and Josh Taylor joining from Ealing Trailfinders, plus 20-year-old Italian winger Malik Faissal from Zebre. Those signings will be supplemented by a new crop from the academy overseen by Mark Hopley, which includes George Tonga’uiha, the son of former player Soane Tonga’uiha, and highly rated back-rower Jack Lewis.

“We don’t want to bring someone in who is going to block the opportunity of someone we think is going to have a big future, so I work very closely with Mark Hopley,” Shields says. Saints did not sign a direct replacement for either Lewis Ludlam or David Ribbans when they joined Toulon because the club knew they had Pollock and Coles primed to step up. The succession planning and recruitment cycle for the 2027-28 season is well under way.

This season, Northampton have averaged 19 English-qualified players in every match-day squad, the highest in the league. For all their top players, it was notable that a relatively unheralded pair of academy products, centre Tom Litchfield and second row Ed Prowse, won players’ and coaches’ player of the season.

Probably the most in-demand person within the office is Josh Turner-Biggs, the lead analyst. A recent screen-time reminder informed him that he spent 10½ hours a day on his computer. It is not just matches that he and fellow analyst Maddie Wand are breaking down, but every second of every training session, which is filmed by drone. When the players came into the cafeteria for breakfast on Tuesday morning, clips of Monday’s session, overlaid with key messages, were screened on televisions.

Preparation had already begun for Saints’ home semi-final opponents, even though at this point they could be facing one of four different teams. “I’d start big picture and look at their themes as a team and what sort of shape they are running,” Wand says. “Once I have a theme then I will look at whether it changes when certain individuals are changing and where this person might be a threat or might be vulnerable.”

Analysts Josh Turner-Biggs and Maddie Wand are tasked with packaging data for players to easily digest - Northampton Saints

There are also masses and masses of data that Turner-Biggs and Wand sort through, separating the pertinent from the pointless. “Sometimes it feels you have to do more in terms of the preview space, but what the coaches actually need is very simple in terms of: how do we get the ball, what opportunities we have got with the ball,” Turner-Biggs says. “Sometimes it feels like you need to search for this one key thing, but actually it is rugby and you want to keep it as simple as possible. The coaches know the game. It is about organising and making it as simple as possible for them to pull out those bits. Ultimately, we’re trying to make it easy for the coaches to make it easy for the players.”

Thursday: No holds barred

There is a buzz in the air before the main team training session of the week. Monday acts as the install day in which the starting XV run through their main plays. In fact, they walk through them as part of a practice labelled Tai Chi, which was introduced by Boyd. On Tuesday, the main team session is termed practice, lifting the tempo and physicality. Thursday’s session is called performance, played at match conditions: full speed, no second chances.

The opposition team, called the Wanderers, contain several internationals including Fin Smith, Freeman and Pollock. And they are not holding back.

“Most weeks we are fortunate to play so we need the guys who are in the Wanderers to bring their best in training so how can I sit there and say you guys as Wanderers need to train hard if I am not bringing my absolute best when I am a Wanderer,” Smith, the England fly-half, says.

The intensity ramps up during Thursday training sessions - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

At a line-out, Coles closes the gap, which leads to a shove from Tom Pearson. That is the spark. Suddenly Pearson and Iyogun are scrapping. A couple of haymakers are thrown, but like all rugby fights it settles down quickly. Afterwards, Pienaar is glowing at what he has witnessed. “It’s exactly where the boys need to be,” Pienaar says. “You need that edge. It shows both starters and opposition are doing their jobs.”

Anywhere you walk inside Franklin’s Gardens, you are only ever five seconds from hearing or seeing the word “hustle”. This is the brainchild of Jake Sharp, the academy transition manager and kicking coach. Every coach wants players to work hard. Sharp’s idea was to “gamify” the GPS monitors that players wear in every match and training session. You accumulate “hustle points” for hitting particular targets around metres per minute, maximum velocity and accelerations relative to your position groups and personal score. Accumulate enough points to win prizes which feed into an overall leaderboard, while Sharp produces a “hustle report” after every game.

A look into the ‘hustle report’ against Gloucester - Northampton Saints

“It is celebrating our work ethic and you hear that in our language around here,” Sharp says. “If anyone walks into this environment, they will very quickly see that is a group which fundamentally works hard for each other.”

It is a trope that every rugby player is always last off the training pitch. In Fin Smith’s case, this is actually true from the sessions I witness this week where he spends a good half-hour kicking with Sharp after everyone else has gone for lunch. This week, the England fly-half is not playing, so he focuses less on goal-kicks and more on trying to find his flow state.

Fin Smith’s extras in training have been rewarded with chances in Steve Borthwick’s England set-up - David Rogers/Getty Images

“We are not counting successful kicks, we are not counting reps – we are chasing a feeling and trying to rely upon our language and what he is physically feeling so he feels comfortable next Friday,” Sharp explains. “From a kicking coach point of view, we are essentially their caddie. So is what they are feeding back from a feeling point of view aligned to what we are seeing from a technical point of view? The closer we are matched the better. Then the key for him leading into next week is that at the back end of next week we would be a little bit more outcome focused in front of the posts, so he gets a feel for that.”

Friday: Chaos is our friend

Throughout my week at Northampton, I am asked by players and staff alike what has been the biggest surprise I have discovered going behind the scenes. My answer is their authenticity. Saints are who they say they are. Some coaches speak in a completely different way in a public-facing role than they do behind closed doors. Dowson is the same person in front of a camera as he is in the changing room.

This applies to the team, too. Part of the reason that I was allowed in was because there is no grand secret around Northampton. There are only ever minor deviations in their game plan from week to week, but knowing it and being able to stop it are two very different things. “There’s no massive secret at Apple or Microsoft either,” Dowson says. “It’s just having really good expertise in the right place.”

Again it will hardly come as a shock that a team that have amassed 99 tries leading into the Harlequins game places a strong emphasis on skills throughout the week in training – this week pass quality was the main goal. Nearly every session begins with coaches using tennis rackets and cricket bats to fire tennis balls at players. Everything revolves around passing and catching – and if there is a distinguishing feature of Saints training this is it. “Catching a ball is massive,” Vesty says. “To move your feet and catch a ball is such a huge part of rugby and that seems such a simple thing. If you can concentrate less on how to catch a ball then that’s providing more bandwidth for looking at a defender, whether he is sitting off you or coming towards you so you have more time to make a decision. The more time you have to make a decision is hugely important because it will increase your decision-making quality and also your execution of that skill.”

On Friday, there is a session called “touches” – originally it was called “150 touches” but there is no longer any emphasis on hitting particular numbers. There are several ad-hoc games going on. Full-back James Pater and wing James Martin are playing foot-tennis against Anthony Belleau and JJ van der Mescht, who has a surprisingly good touch for a big man.

Furbank rocks a different look during training - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

Bullough is firing tennis balls at a group of backs while the front rowers are playing a competitive game of spike-ball.

“I think so much of rugby and evasion games is about the connection and organising as much as it is about the skill,” Vesty says. “The skills bit is the execution. The harder bit is the decision-making and organising so we spend a lot of time on getting them to organise themselves and getting connected.

“Chaos is absolutely your best friend because if you can execute under chaos then you are going to be so much further ahead. Perfection is the enemy of good. If you are learning to drive, you expect someone to stall, so why go into the world where you expect everything to be perfect. And what is perfect? Not dropping a ball? For me that would mean I have not created enough pressure. I am far happier when it looks messy, it looks chaotic, but knowing there’s lots of learning going on.”

Pollock bites his gumshield as Saints prepare for their final regular-season match - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

That sense of fun that you can see in Vesty’s sessions permeates the whole club. Clearly the atmosphere will be different during play-off week, but whether among the players or the coaches, the soundtrack is one of constant laughter. A particular highlight was seeing winger George Hendy’s video diary that he presented to the rest of the backs; his deadpan delivery would fit in perfectly at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Saturday: Sucker punch on match day

After staying overnight at Syon Park, Northampton’s team bus arrives at the Stoop at 1.45pm. The players slowly fill the away changing room. Some have headphones in. Others are looking at their phones. But when Dowson starts talking, he has their undivided attention.

In their partnership, Vesty looks after all the on-field coaching while Dowson is responsible for management, but that means him having a hand in everything from line-outs to marketing to contract renewals. On Friday morning, Dowson was invited to present to Colliers International, a property company which was having their away day at Franklin’s Gardens.

Phil Dowson (left) and Sam Vesty (right) have formed a formidable partnership - Darren Staples for The Telegraph

But the changing room is his natural environment. This is where he comes alive. All week he has been highlighting unsung heroes West and James, who will be moving on at the end of the season, while on Saturday his spotlight turns to Sonny Tonga’uiha who is making his Prem Rugby debut against Quins. “Sonny has been given the opportunity today to show who he is and what he is capable of,” Dowson says. “I would love to hear how strongly we feel about him when he comes on the field today, so that is really tangible along with Westy.

“A great training week and I have no problem kicking the f--- out of each other on Thursday, but it means absolute nothing if we don’t kick the f--- out of them today. We want to be fast and physical. How fast can we go? How physical can we be up front? Can we f------ go lads? That’s the question. Lose yourself in the game lads, lose yourself in your jobs.”

Saints do start fast through the first of two tries from scrum-half Jonny Weimann, but Harlequins immediately hit back through Alex Dombrandt, which sets a pattern for the match. Northampton are on top at the set-piece and make 16 entries into the Quins 22, but they are dominated at the breakdown by the Harlequins back row of Jack Kennigham, Will Evans and Dombrandt, who help win 13 turnovers for the home side.

At the death, Saints suffer a sucker punch as Tom Lawday scores in the corner to secure Harlequins a 38-31 victory. Just three minutes earlier Northampton had possession in the Harlequins 22, but while the result stings, Dowson re-emphasises the bigger picture with a home play-off against Leicester to come on Friday night.

“It is the end of the regular season and we have won the league with a record number of points and tries – that’s an unbelievable effort,” Dowson says. “We are a very good group. We have a semi-final on Friday night, but I don’t give a f--- who turns up to be frank.”