How England scrum half Alex Mitchell has taken his game to a new level
Alex Mitchell once tried sidestepping an entire team; now the Northampton scrum half explains to Daniel Schofield, the deputy rugby correspondent at the Daily Telegraph, how he has taken his game to a new level.
From the moment he stepped through the door at Lymm Rugby Club as a five-year-old, Alex Mitchell only ever wanted to have a ball in his hands.
“He did his training and as he got older he did the weights,” Steve Downes, who coached Mitchell for 13 years, says. “He did all that but actually to Alex it was essential to get a rugby ball in his hands. He just wanted to play rugby. That’s when he was his happiest.”
While he was always a scrum half, Mitchell often played at full back or even in the centres at Lymm to give other players an opportunity to play. His final game at Lymm was as an 18-year-old in the Senior Colts ‘Cock o’ the North’ Final against Wharfedale.
“They were the National Colts champions so they were the favourites,” Downes recalls. “But on that day Alex was just on another level in our last ever game together as a team. At half time, he had scored four tries and we were 40-0 up. There was a guy giving a running commentary in the stands and at half time he said ‘who is that bloody nine from Lymm?’ He won that game singlehandedly.
“He was always a bit special, and he had this fantastic step from the age of six. He could step everyone. When he first started out, he was quite greedy. He would go step, step, step and we would shout ‘put the ball out there Alex, don’t try to step everyone in the team’. Once we got him going after 13, he learnt the trade as a scrum half.”
This is still where Mitchell is at his happiest with ball in hand, the live wire who buzzes around looking for slow-footed defenders to sidestep. These are the qualities that make him such a dangerous weapon for Northampton in the Gallagher Premiership. As England head coach Steve Borthwick has frequently pointed out, he also provides the fastest service of all his scrum halves. But just as he did at Lymm, Mitchell has learnt to love the other side of half-back play, the art of box kicking and tactical game management which has elevated his overall game.
Given how integral he is to England’s gameplan, reflected by the fact that he lasted a full 80 minutes in the 26-25 victory against France at the Allianz Stadium, it is easy to forget that he was not part of Borthwick’s initial squad for the 2023 World Cup. Ben Youngs, Danny Care and Jack van Poortvliet were the first three choices for the tournament in France until the latter’s unfortunately timed injury opened the door for Mitchell to come in.
Once he did, he barely looked back, becoming England’s starting scrum half throughout the World Cup. That culminated in a masterful performance in the semi-final against South Africa. Mitchell’s standards have remained around that level ever since and his absence with a neck injury was sorely felt during the Autumn Nations Series.
Mitchell cannot identify one moment when everything suddenly clicked for him, but a gradual realisation that he needed more than one string to his bow if he was to really kick on.
“When I was younger I just wanted to play quick and attack and try and find line breaks,” he said. “You have got to appreciate Test match rugby is different, defences are better and you need to play in the right areas and put pressure back on the opposition. Appreciating that over the last two years has been huge for me, and just getting opportunities playing whether it is for Saints or England.”
There is no secret scrum half society with a holy tract of how to put your box kick on a sixpence. Instead, Mitchell has had to study and learn. He dissects the best scrum halves in the world, name-checking Antoine Dupont, Jamison Gibson-Park and Faf de Klerk. It also means analysing his own performances, using sounding boards like his brother James, himself a scrum half, for game theory discussions of what they would do in particular scenarios.
“It is watching footage, watching games back and talking to players and coaches about what they would want to do in different scenarios,” Mitchell said. “If you are down a yellow card or are under a lot of pressure from the other side. It is game time, the feeling you get on the field and the more you play the more confident you feel in that space. In training I am always trying to train game scenarios, if it is a tight game, two minutes left, what would you do here?
“I go to the coaches a lot of the time and ask them stuff and a lot of time they come to me and say ‘what would you do differently?’ It is not always a black and white answer, there are grey areas. Some of the players at Northampton and England, the likes of George Ford, I was behind Ben Youngs and Danny Care at England for a couple of years, so I tried to pick their brains. They have got so much experience, I learned a lot from them.”
While it is tempting to say that Mitchell is the complete package at scrum half, he is missing one vital ingredient associated with so many No 9s down the years: a gob.
“He never gets involved with the snarky side of the game,” Downes said. “He was never interested in that. He has a massive determination to win, but not at all costs. He knows the rugby code. I don’t think Alex ever had a bad word with a ref. We are as proud of him for the way he conducts himself as we are for all the caps he has won for England.”
