Seven years ago Jake Letts, CEO of Philippine Rugby, got a call from the union’s treasurer, who explained that his godson was in Manila, and wanted to pop along to a training session Letts was running for the national under-19 team. The kid was only 15, Letts remembers, “but he only wants to hold some bags or whatever”. So Letts told him to go stand at full-back, “the boys will kick to you and you can collect it and kick it back or whatever”. He caught the first ball and broke into a run, past one, two, three of the bigger kids. Letts remembers looking up to the coach next to him, and asking him: “Who did you say this kid was again?”
“I didn’t know anything about him,” Letts says. “I just knew right away that he had sheer talent.”
It seems almost everyone who has ever worked with Marcus Smith has a story like that. For Jim Evans, who was forwards coach when Smith was at the Harlequins academy, it was an under-15s match at Harrow. “I remember thinking: ‘This kid has really got something about him.’” For Russell Earnshaw, Smith’s coach on the England Pathway, it was a training session at Harlequins: “I vividly remember watching him and thinking: ‘Wow, that’s quite exciting.’” And for Nick Buoy, Smith’s coach at Brighton College, it was when Smith made his debut for the first XV at 16. “We brought him on at scrum-half and he changed the whole game, turned it on its head, it was incredible to watch. And we thought: ‘Well, do you know what? He’s probably ready to start at fly-half.’”
Eddie Jones hasn’t quite made his mind up about that yet, so the 80,000-odd England fans at Twickenham this weekend may have to have to wait a little longer for their own epiphany. Smith played those two second-string Tests against the USA and Canada in the summer, but Jones put him on the bench for the match against Tonga. If Owen Farrell is ruled out, Smith may yet start, and maybe if he’d been fully fit in training this week, it would have been that way to begin with. Because Smith has it in him to light up this England team, and Jones knows it. He has had one eye on him ever since he saw him play for Brighton College in 2015, the same week his Japan team beat the Springboks.
That talent has always been there, in his instinctive understanding of space, and his hand-eye coordination. Stephens could see it when he coaching Smith at Centaurs RFC in Singapore. “He could actually do things other kids couldn’t even see,” Stephens says. Evans shares a copy of a self-assessment Smith wrote after an under-14s session with Harlequins: “Best thing I did today? Step-pass someone, and off-loaded out of the back of the hand,” Smith wrote. “What did I learn? Trying a grubber kick opposite to a spiral, must do that in a match now.” “That’s so Marcus,” Evans says now, “even as a 14-year-old he was already a bit different.”
For Earnshaw, it was exactly those qualities that marked Smith out. “I think skill is king,” Earnshaw says. “If you can pass off both hands, kick off both feet, then, well, they’re quite helpful skills to have in rugby, aren’t they? But there actually aren’t that many people who are that good at them in my experience. I work with a lot of kids that age, and I’m always trying to go backwards and ask: ‘Why aren’t they as skilful as the most skilful players I’ve coached?’” Some of it is down to his family background, and the amount of time he spent playing with his two brothers in the back garden, but Earnshaw thinks a lot of credit has to go back to the early work he did with Centaurs in Singapore.
“In those days there weren’t too many rugby clubs in Singapore, only us and one other,” Paul Stephens explains, “so there weren’t actually many matches, and we spent more time coaching and training than we did playing, which is a bit of a different balance to what you get back in England. And probably it frustrated the kids at the time, but in retrospect it was a good thing because we had more time to focus on the basic skills.” Smith actually started playing touch rugby in Manila, where his mum is from, and where he lived for his first six years. He keeps up his links with both Singapore and the Philippines now. His younger brothers are both in the Philippine setup, Luc’s been playing for their national team since 2019.
“He definitely has a special place in our rugby community,” says Letts, “knowing that he started his rugby back with the Manila Nomads, but the best thing is he’s always been proud to be Pinoy. He’s made an active effort to give back, he passes on signed memorabilia, so we can raise money, and he contacted us pre-Covid about organising some tours to the Philippines to help develop Asia rugby, and that was off his own initiative.” Which is typical. “What you see is what you get with Marcus,” Stephens says. “He’s a genuinely nice lad.” At Brighton, Buoy says, “as amazingly proud as we are of what he’s achieving on the field, we’re almost prouder of the way he’s dealing with it all.”
As Earnshaw says, skill only goes so far. Smith’s other great strength, the one everyone mentions, is his character, and especially his competitive streak. “It’s not just that he wants to win, but that he’s always trying to find ways of getting better. Marcus would learn something new every day if he could.” Stephens agrees. “He had a massive desire to better himself, so whilst he’s got a huge amount of natural talent, he’s got a huge work ethic to go with it.”
At Brighton, working with Buoy, Smith found a coach who knew how to challenge him. “We would put him in environments where he was pushed all the time,” says Buoy. “Of course there’s a balance to how hard and fast you do push people in that way, but it was clear early on that he had a lot of mental resilience, and that he enjoyed it.” They would set him targets, like scoring a try with a cross-field kick to the prop. At England, Earnshaw would stick him in a target top and give the other players extra points for tackling him, or deliberately tell people to give him the wrong information, so that he had to learn how to speak up and contradict them.
“He was always given free rein to experiment, no matter whether it was a big game or a training session, just because then he will learn more from it and be a better player for it,” Buoy says. They borrowed bits and pieces from all sports, taekwondo, judo, basketball, Aussie Rules, even synchronised swimming.
And Smith just soaked it all up. “He has the ability to see what’s in front of him, and solve problems very, very quickly,” says Buoy, “the speed at which he can process information while catching, passing, kicking, is a real skill. There were other areas we had to work on, like leadership and his speed and strength, that we had to really work hard on. But one thing he had throughout was just that ability to get quick solutions to the problem in front of him.”
It meant Smith grew into a player who “had the ability to make everyone around him better, because he had that ability to make people believe in him, and believe in themselves, and then suddenly you’ve got a team that believes, you suddenly start moving forwards very quickly, which is what you see at Harlequins at the moment.” At Brighton, they even moved him into coaching. In his last year at the club he coached the team at the Rosslyn Park 7s. By the end, Buoy says, Smith “almost had the ability to get the team to score whenever they needed to score. It looked very similar to what it’s like watching him play with Quins in the Premiership at the moment to be honest, where he has the ability to make things happen at the right times.”
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There is something gladdening about all this, a sense of the system working the way it should, a talented young player supported by coaches from school, club, and country, all working together to get the best out of him. And like the rest of us, they’re all waiting to see what Smith can do for England when it really matters, just as soon as Jones gives him that chance. If his career so far tells you anything, it’s that he’s ready for it.