The new England home kit, if you haven't seen it,
is much like many others. The same cannot be
said of the man chosen to model it in Leeds on
Tuesday afternoon.
Marland Yarde has only been playing rugby for seven
years. He made his professional debut only three years
ago, and watched the last round of autumn
internationals high in the stands at Twickenham. Eleven
months on, he is the insiders' tip to be picked on the
wing when England meet Australia on the first weekend
in November.
Is the 21-year-old intimidated by the hype that has
grown around him, dizzied by his rapid rise through
the ranks? On the surface at least, not a bit of it.
"No-one puts more pressure on me than myself," he
says. "I'm by no means the finished article, and I still
feel like I've got a lot to learn in my game. But I'm
trying to learn as quickly as I can."
Six foot tall, weighing just a steak or two under 15
stone, Yarde is a wrecking-ball of a wing, delighting in
smashing through tackles as much as stepping and
dipping. In five starts for London Irish this season he
has four tries, a marked upturn on his strike rate of five
from his previous 22 Premiership matches prior to this
campaign.
There is pace, for sure, but there is also explosive
power, and both a strength at the breakdown and
appetite for destruction in the tackle.
His coach at the Exiles, former England backs coach
Brian Smith, reckons he can improve by more than
25%. In which case, national head coach Stuart
Lancaster has even greater reason to be grateful that
Yarde's mother opted to leave her native St Lucia to
study law in London in 2001 and bring her nine-year-
old son with her.
Yarde's father may make more headlines - his first
name, remarkably, is Scotland - but it was Marina who
first encouraged his sporting ambitions and then, on a
fateful November morning in 2003, allowed her son to
sit in front of the television and watch his first game of
rugby.
Spectators have endured less edifying debuts. Yarde
may not have had a clue who Jonny Wilkinson was, but
the sight of him winning the World Cup for England
that morning had an immediate and lasting impact.
"I loved the passion there was for that match, and how
it affected the mood of the whole nation," he
remembers. "For the first time I thought, this is a sport
I could take up."
A 14-year-old at Gunnersbury School in west London,
Yarde was a midfielder with sufficient promise to train
with Queens Park Rangers and a triple jumper good
enough to compete at the English Schools
Championships in Gateshead.
Even now, Smith compares him to a 60m sprinter. But
rugby, despite that late start, had taken a firm hold.
"I got picked for England Under-16s, and then I was
offered a scholarship at Whitgift, which is a really good
school," he says. "From then on I was playing rugby
almost daily, and I loved it. I took it on into England
Under-18s and then the London Irish academy.
"My mum struggled with it at first. She couldn't
understand at the start why people were hitting me so
hard. But she's OK with it now - she comes to watch all
our home games, and she's probably my biggest fan."
Yarde credits several coaches as being critical to his
rapid rise: John Flynn, head of youth rugby
development at London Irish; Chris Wilkins, his coach
at Whitgift; Justin Bishop, the former Exiles wing who
was then assistant academy director at the club; and
Mike Catt, Exiles player-coach and now part of
Lancaster's coaching team with the national side.
Then there is the inspiration.
"Someone I try to emulate in terms of his style of play
is Joe Rokocoko," says Yarde with relish. "His physical,
abrasive style of play, and his love of contact - the
man's a legend."
Rokocoko famously began his All Blacks career with a
barrage of tries - 17 in his first season, 25 in his first 20
Tests. On his full debut against Argentina this summer,
his young acolyte bagged two.
It is a lofty comparison, and one which England
supporters should be happy to play down. For all
Yarde's youthful brio and his coach's faith in young
guns and fresh faces, this autumn's contests against the
Wallabies, Pumas and All Blacks represent a significant
step up in both atmosphere and expectation.
England ended the last Six Nations on a nosedive.
Australia are rebuilding at pace under new head coach
Ewen McKenzie; Argentina have previous in dampening
autumnal English expectations, while the All Blacks'
displays in the Rugby Championship suggest a side far
less likely to be upset as they were at Twickenham last
time out.
But with the next World Cup less than two years away,
there is an opportunity too over the next six months
for new talent to establish itself. Not every player who
starts that tournament is likely to have the prerequisite
40 or 50 caps. And Yarde, even in his stunted career,
has a happy history at HQ: as a schoolboy, he scored
three tries there for Whitgift to help them win the Daily
Mail Cup final and then, two days later, ran in four
more for England Under-18s against Scotland.
"I had been there before to watch the Middlesex
Sevens, but actually playing at Twickenham was weird,"
he says. "Scoring was a real turning point for me. From
there I really wanted to kick on."
Has he imagined himself running out there for England
in the autumn of 2015, bringing his own rugby
education full circle?
"It's something I'd love to achieve, and Stuart
Lancaster has said it doesn't matter about age - if
you're performing, you're going to get picked. So it's
there at the back of my mind.
"But every part of my game I want to get better at. At
international level, everything is under scrutiny, and
you have to make sure every aspect of your game is as
good as it can be.
"Every time I step out onto the field I want to improve.
And every time I play a game of rugby, I'm learning all
the time. I need to keep bettering myself."
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