What’s gone wrong for Freddie Steward and how he can start for England again

On Saturday evening at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Leicester Tigers are hoping for fourth time lucky against Leinster, the team who have beaten them in the Champions Cup in each of the past three years – once in this season’s pool at Welford Road, and at the quarter-final stage in 2022 and 2023.

It is also a magnificent opportunity for Leicester’s full-back Freddie Steward to remind everyone of his talent, after a tough period for a player still only 23 years of age. The 6ft 5ins colossus has been a Tigers first-teamer for a solid five seasons, and that hasn’t changed. But with England, the idea of Steward as an automatic pick has changed in the last few months, and we have contemplated instead a team selected by Steve Borthwick with horses for courses, or even possibly a lasting shift to a different plan.

As Leicester’s head coach Dan McKellar observed on Thursday, the best players in the world can get dropped, or not selected. McKellar’s chosen example was cricket in his native Australia, and the former captain Ricky Ponting, as “one of the best players ever to play the game”.

And Steward was certainly dining at rugby’s top table in his spectacular and sustained initial rush to prominence.

From the summer of 2021, and his debut against the USA at Twickenham, Steward made his first 28 Test appearances for England without missing a match. In the Rugby Players’ Association awards of 2022, he was named young player of the year and England men’s player of the year, and he won the latter prize again last May. He was named at full-back in World Rugby’s Dream Team of the Year for 2022, alongside such luminaries as Tadhg Furlong, Antoine Dupont and Johnny Sexton. In November of that year, Steward was being described as “one of the first names on the teamsheet” of Eddie Jones’s England.

But Jones was shortly to get the sack, to be replaced for the start of 2023 by Borthwick. Still, Steward’s granddad was on local TV in East Anglia at the start of that year’s Six Nations, relating how at one family Christmas in Norfolk, he had confidently told a 13-year-old Freddie he would play for England one day. And Borthwick, in any case, had come straight from his job as Leicester’s head coach, presiding over the team with Steward at No 15 who won the Premiership in June 2022.

The bright and always publicly engaging Steward also completed an economics degree last year, with a 2:1 at Loughborough University. On LinkedIn, he wrote: “I owe a huge amount to mum and dad for keeping me sane when things got difficult and even more to some great friends who I was lucky enough to live and study alongside. Hoping it [the degree] comes in handy one day!”

The change for Steward and England began to unfold at the World Cup in France in September and October of his season. His remarkable record of consecutive selection was ended in England’s third pool match, against the easybeats of Chile, with the surprise move for Marcus Smith to have a run at No 15. Steward had been pictured on TV looking none too happy when he was substituted by Smith after 68 minutes of the preceding win over Japan.

Steward returned to the starting lineup for the final pool match with Samoa, before he was dropped for Smith in the quarter-final against Fiji, then started against South Africa at 15, and was on the wing, with Smith at 15, for the third-placed match against Argentina. Leicester have also very occasionally started him on the wing – as in the 55-24 quarter-final loss away to Leinster last April – but this does expose Steward’s lack of top-rank foot speed.

Going into the 2024 Six Nations, Steward was one of the players chosen by Netflix for filming behind-the-scenes segments in the second series of their Full Contact documentary. But a new rival for England emerged – or re-emerged. Steward started the first two matches against Italy and Wales, both wins, then he was dropped from the 23 to face against Scotland, Ireland and France, as the Northampton Saints full-back, George Furbank, was brought in. Borthwick explained it was “brilliant to have two full-backs have of such incredible quality”, while noting Furbank’s high rate of line-break assists and a desire for the right “balance” with the punchy Ollie Lawrence being chosen in the centres, and George Ford bound to be an influential voice at fly-half.

Steward bounced back from this obvious disappointment by setting a Premiership record for this season of 28 carries against Gloucester two weeks ago, albeit in a surprise defeat, for a total of 165 metres. And no one has ever needed a Steward’s inquiry over his wonderful defence under the high ball, but this naturally lessens in importance if opponents aren’t using it as a tactic. Furthermore, England’s official statistics give him zero offloads in his 33 caps, and that has a ring of a former Test No 15 Mike Brown about it – a fantastic defender and carrier, but not so much a provider of continuity when taking contact, which is what Furbank, who can also play fly-half, gives to England.

Changes of coach or assistant coach have been a feature of Steward’s career; the latest at Leicester saw attack coach Alan Dickens arrive last summer, only to go on leave near the end of the year, with no public explanation to date. Tigers’ former centre Matt Smith has stepped into the breach, and McKellar admitted on Thursday this has not been ideal: “That’s an area we’ll look to tidy up and make sure that we’ve got an experienced, quality coach to come in and help improve that area at the right time.”

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McKellar says he wants to get the ball in the hands of Steward, Ollie Hassell-Collins and Solomone Kata. And on Steward, specifically, McKellar praised his attitude in recent weeks as “superb” and “mature and first-class, as you’d expect”, while admitting some tender care had been necessary while he had been on England duty.

“You just drop him a message when he’s in camp, and let the players know that you’re there for them if they want to have a chat, at any stage, and put an arm round them,” McKellar said.

“I have spoken to him and I know Ben Youngs who is the most-capped English male player ever has had a chat to him as well. He [Steward] stormed onto the scene at a rate of knots and didn’t have to deal with a whole lot of adversity. Now he does.

“He’ll be a better rugby player, he’ll be a better human being for it and he’ll come through. He’ll play a lot more Test matches for England, I think. It was pretty clear it was a tactical change there, and we’ll work on areas that Fred wants to continue to work on to ensure that when they go to New Zealand and Japan [this summer], he’s well in the frame.”