BRENDAN Venter might have accused Prem Rugby of being an autocracy in the week but he is set on doing the RFU a few favours.
Venter met with Twickenham‘s executive director of performance, and his old coach from London Irish, Conor O’Shea last week to outline his plans for Saracens‘ crop of youngsters.
The club are going to give the up-and-comers, like lock Olamide Sodeke, , and wing Angus Hall, both 21, as much game time as they can to accelerate their development.
O’Shea recently said one of his biggest problems was getting high-octane matches into promising players so Venter’s scheme on his return to Saracens, now as ‘head of culture and technical consultant’, would have been music to his ears.
Venter, 56, said: “We’ve really bought into this English thing. We want to work with the RFU, we met with Conor and I think it is super healthy.
“How do we bring these kids through? We need to play them. How is Jack Bracken () going to become a superstar? He can’t be a potential superstar his whole life. “How is Angus () going to be a superstar, he’s going to have to play. So, we said to Conor, we’re going to rotate, we’re going to give these kids the opportunity to play. They will make mistakes, they will need the is He potentia sule e id going get things wrong. That’s just the way it is.
“But we see England as our partners, they pay a lot of money for our players to play for them. How can they not be our partners? We actually do well financially if our kids go into the England set up.” The current England set-up has big Saracens links with Steve Borthwick and Richard Wigglesworth former players and performance director Phil Morrow an ex-employee of the north Londoners. And Venter has vowed to co-operate when it comes to managing the load of senior players.
Venter added: “They are coincidentally our friends, Steve worked with us, Phil worked with us but it’s not that, it’s the model and they are our partners. If they ask us to rest someone because the game time is too much, we will rest them, we’re not going to fight them. One of the reasons we need depth in our squad is, if we need to rest Maro Itoje, Olamide can step in.”
Venter covered a lot of bases in his first media briefing in his new role on Wednesday at Saracens’ training ground near St Albans.
He is back at the club permanently for the first time since halfway through the title-winning season of 2010-11 when he handed the director of rugby reins to Mark McCall but remained as a consultant.
Venter would join up with the team five or six times a year, juggling his GP work in Cape Town, and says he will know it is time to leave when the coaching team don’t need him to intervene.
“That is when I go,” said Venter. “I would love to develop the people on the inside and then to say to the owner, this is your club, we are in a better place. We were not in a bad place because Mark has done an amazing job. But the owner said, ‘can we change certain cultural things’?”
■ Brendan Venter compared Prem Rugby’s media obligations to “something from an autocratic land”.
Having returned to a full-time role at the club in the summer as director of rugby, he has since been given an updated job title of head of culture and technical director.
His no-show at a pre-season media event cost Saracens a £5,000 fine and he avoided questions before and after the club’s opening-round win over Leicester.
He insists he does not want to be the public face of the club. “I have the desire as a human being not to want to talk,” he said. “It is not about me, it is about the team… I expressed that desire before I came.” Venter added: “I asked really kindly and eventually I bent over backwards to explain my position. And then I’m expected again to come and do an interview.
“If we get obsessed, get into an argument and fine a club, that for me does not make sense.
“It sounds like something from an autocratic land, not a democracy where people have the right to say: ‘This is what I want to do.’
“If you want an interview, you have a brilliant person in Joe (Shaw, head coach). I do not have the desire to do an interview. It stole my joy the previous time and I want to have a low profile.
“That was my desire and to help to coach the rugby team. I do not want to be doing interviews. It’s not because I think I’m better than anybody else. To be put over as an arrogant person who thinks he’s better than doing interviews… it’s not at all that.”
