April 4, 2007

World Cup winner Ben Cohen has been fine-tuning the skills of one of the game’s most exciting young wing talents.

Northampton Saints teenager David Smith starts for England’s youth team when they kick off the IRB Under-19 World Championship campaign in Belfast tomorrow night.

Smith, an 18-year-old from Frinton in Essex, has made rapid progress through the representative ranks in the two years since joining the Saints from Colchester.

After helping England win the Home Unions title at Under-18 level last year, he has won his first caps for the Under-19 and Under-20 sides and scored a try on his England Sevens debut in Wellington earlier this season.

Now extra polish has been added to his game by Cohen, who has scored 31 tries in his 56-game international career and lifted the Webb Ellis Trophy with England in 2003.

And that can only help Smith’s cause as he prepares for the group games against Samoa, Argentina and New Zealand in the next nine days.

"I owe a lot to all my coaches at Northampton: Ali Hepher, Rob Hunter and Grant Seely," said Smith.

"I’ve also been doing some one-to-one work with Ben Cohen, who’s been helping me learn more about reading defences and the skills I need to work on.

"He’s been to the very highest level of the game and it’s great to be able to learn from someone who has won a World Cup.

"Ben’s such a big figure at the club and has been there for a long time so it’s nice when he checks out the way you’re playing.

"We’ve talked about things like adjusting your depth and position in attack, almost floating behind the rest of the attacking line and knowing when to offer yourself as a runner.

"Defensively you have to learn to read who you’re playing against and what they do, and how to defend against players of different sizes and skills."

England will take a step into the unknown against Samoa at Shaw’s Bridge tomorrow, the first of a trio of games against Southern Hemisphere sides.

But the camp is in a confident mood after last month’s thumping 29-5 win against fourth seeds France at Henley, when they built a 24-0 lead in what one eminent coach described as 'the best 40 minutes of rugby put together by an England team this season'.

"Our preparation’s been pretty good and if we do well in these tough early games it should give us more confidence," said Smith, who returned home last month to present awards to Colchester’s mini-rugby players.

"We’ve played France and Italy this season, and last year we played Scotland, Ireland and Wales so we know them fairly well.

"New Zealand will obviously be a big game for us and with three Southern Hemisphere sides in our group it’ll be a great experience to play against a different style of rugby.

"The opposition will be guessing a bit about us. We don’t have any obvious superstars so they won’t know much about us and that could work in our favour too. They might even fear us a bit."

Match schedule
April 5: Samoa v England (Shaw’s Bridge, 7.30pm)
April 9: Argentina v England (Belfast Harlequins, 7.30pm)
April 13: New Zealand v England (Ravenhill, 5.30pm)
April 17: Match Day Four
April 21: Match Day Five