North v South games have set us up well for Six Nations

Q&A ALAN DICKENS ON THE RECORD

- NEALE HARVEY

Former Sale, Leeds, Saracens and Northampton scrum-half Alan Dickens has been head coach of England U20s for just over a year now. He tells NEALE HARVEY why the last nine, Covid-affected, months have been anything but wasted time.

It’s nine months since England’s last U20s match against Italy was cancelled, so what’s been happening since then?

Is it really that long? Sometimes it just seems like yesterday! A lot of players haven’t played since then and I even came across some first-year players in the academies who hadn’t played since before Christmas last year due to injuries and the lockdown. Since March, though, one of the conscious decisions we made was that we needed to stay connected with lads in the pathway, not just the U18s and U20s but also some of those boys who’d just recently left the group and maybe hadn’t broken into first teams at their clubs. One of the first things we did, in conjunction with our U18s head coach Jon Pendlebury and England team manager Richard Hill, was to arrange a series of position-specific Zoom calls with senior members of England’s first team squad, which proved to be enormously beneficial.

How did that all work?