Sam Vesty interview: Rugby is starting to understand that attack puts bums on seats

Northampton are making a name for themselves as English rugby’s greatest showmen. With ambition and audacity, the Saints have climbed to the top of the Premiership table playing the most attractive rugby in the league. This weekend the fight continues on a second front, with a Champions Cup quarter-final against the Bulls and, who knows, a potential semi-final against either Leinster or La Rochelle thereafter.

Phil Dowson, the director of rugby, is the shrewd, rational mind leading Northampton to new heights but the mastermind behind the razzle-dazzle offensive is head coach Sam Vesty. Vesty, predominantly a fly-half or full-back in his playing days with Leicester and Bath, left Worcester to join Northampton as attack coach in 2018 before stepping up with the departure of former director of rugby Chris Boyd four years later.

Vesty may well be the ringmaster of Northampton’s circus but, under himself and Dowson, a grit and a steel has also been developed. “Toughness” is how Vesty describes it. Playing heads-up rugby can be coached but Midland mettle cannot be. It is why, despite Saints’ stylish modus operandi, Vesty still has time for an up-the-jumper approach.

“There is a beauty in winning in different ways,” Vesty tells Telegraph Sport. “You can be a power team and go through the middle. That’s good for the game, to have a variety of ways of winning. But I think the whole game is getting better at [moving the ball]. The more rugby I’ve watched recently – probably since the World Cup – I would say more teams are opening up, taking a few more risks. The South African teams who, historically, might have had a reputation for kicking and chasing, those guys are moving the ball incredibly well to space and counter-attacking fantastically. They’re opening the game up. The more I watch the French sides, there’s more of that, too.

“Is it that refs are now being told that we want a quicker game? The way it’s being refereed is to increase the ball-in-play time. Everyone wants the game to go faster and it’s the way it’s heading. People are getting on that bandwagon.

“A good example is Finn Russell going to Bath. Suddenly, the game opens up. Their attitude to risk has changed.

“I do think that people are coming round to the fact that we want to put bums on seats and inspire people to play this beautiful game of ours.”

Vesty’s impressive rugby intellect and his infectious enthusiasm for the sport has started to make waves outside of his native East Midlands. In February, the 42-year-old took the reins of the England A attack in the hammering of Portugal, imparting his wisdom on the country’s most promising players. His ethos, the secret to the Saints’ success, is simple.

“Lots of people talk about attacking shape but we have ours so that we can get out of it as quickly as possible,” he says. “We have shape to de-structure a defence. As soon as a defence is de-structured, we’re playing what’s in front of us.

“When I started I was quite shape-based, and as I’ve coached I’ve gone further away from that. Seeing Toulouse play, comparing the French attack – and its qualities – to the Ireland attack which has different qualities, but they’re so effective in their own ways. They’d be two fantastic attacks that I admire hugely. Our attack has evolved but I have simplified it over the years.

“We want to have a threat across the whole field, so that if there are 13 defenders stood in a line, there is a hole between each of them and we want to be threatening every one of those spaces as well as the areas behind, the kick spaces. You start with a structure from line-outs, scrums and kick-offs. How do we de-structure that D [clicks fingers] to then go and play what’s in front of us?

“It’s fantastic to watch – don’t get me wrong, I love it – but the bits we focus on are very simple: find two-on-ones and be good at picking them off. It’s about encouraging people to find those and consistently reinforcing what allows us to go and do those things: getting our heads up and talking. Get up, look up, talk up. Follow those three principles and then we’ll be good at rugby, because our players are good at rugby. Alex Mitchell is a bloody good rugby player; we want to allow him to go and be a good rugby player, not burden him. Free him up. From a mindset point of view – not technical – it’s about freeing people up to play what’s in front of them. The amount of times, after being asked ‘what am I going to do next?’, I say: ‘Get your head up and make a rugby decision’.”

That is no use in a side with a soft underbelly – it sounds “airy-fairy”, as Vesty puts it. Owing to that, Northampton have emphasised recruiting tough players and Vesty should know one when he sees one. As a fourth generation Tiger, Vesty began his playing career behind one of the most formidable packs in the history of European rugby – but in Pat Howard, he found an attack inspiration, too.

“I was at Leicester in an era when my formative years were with... my first captain was Martin Johnson,” Vesty says. “You just couldn’t believe how fortunate you were. But the group there was ridiculous: Johnson, Ben Kay, Richard Cockerill, Dorian West, Neil Back, Martin Corry, Lewis Moody – and others. They were hard on themselves. Fundamentally, I loved it. It resonated with who I was and who I am. That was hugely formative. They were so fricking tough, it was ridiculous. And tough people keep working hard. When the s--- hits the fan, they keep working hard and that’s what you need.

“Pat was my first [senior] coach and he would always ask why we were trying to do certain things. I took a lot from him. But if I had stayed in one place, I would have been quite narrow-minded.”

Fighting on both a domestic and European front brings added hurdles but there is genuine excitement at Northampton; the Saints are not daunted by the scale of the challenge.

“Flip me,” Vesty says. “If the option is not having that... I absolutely love it. This is what it’s about, testing yourself against the best. The back-end of these competitions is where you get really tested.

“And how excited are we! You’re in a quarter - and you’re either there or you’re not. Flip, I’d rather be us – every day of the week. Yeah, it puts a bit of stress on but I’d rather have that than not have it. But ask me on Monday morning!

“We go to work and a big part of what we do is fun. Our environment is a nice place to be; good fun, tough, but we laugh at each other and ourselves.”

Good fun and tough? On current form, that sums up the Saints nicely.