England: Five complex issues facing Steve Borthwick’s ‘nearly men’ as ‘season of reckoning’ awaits with ‘failure not an option’ in Six Nations
Steve Borthwick and England need a big year.
With England set to announce their Elite Player Squad (EPS) on Tuesday, January 14, Steve Borthwick faces the huge task of turning his coaching tenure around.
For some judges, it’s been a welcome return to an orderly and sensible selection and strategy, one that’s delivered a Rugby World Cup Bronze Medal, one where they came within a point of overturning the world champions, South Africa. For others, it’s a story of nearly, perhaps, mights and ifs, and a consistent failure to close out matches that England should or could have won.
Record
Borthwick’s record underlines the thinking around nearly men. In his tenure so far, he’s recorded 13 wins and 14 losses in his 29 games in charge. However, out of those Tests, against the ‘Big Four’ – France, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa – his team have managed a dismal record of one solitary win out of 11 attempts.
England‘s high point might be claimed to be their World Cup campaign, but look under the hood of that period and England’s challenges were Fiji and Argentina, with a very easy route through the tournament until they met South Africa in the semi-final. Yes, they beat Ireland in a fantastic display in the 2024 Six Nations and that remains the apex of Borthwick’s tenure.
However, interspersed in those results are losses to Wales, a record thrashing at Twickenham by France and 10 losses to the elite teams. Those 10 elite losses from 11 are the very targets that England themselves suggest are key to their development, yet only have a 9% success rate, a KPI rather unlikely to trigger another one of Bill Sweeney’s bumper bonuses.
So the question remains, how does England, and Borthwick, move forward and make the transition from good to great?
Culture
One of Borthwick’s former coaches remarked recently that whilst other players would react to a hearts and minds coaching approach, that didn’t work for the England head coach in his playing days. Give him a happy space with clear measurement, together with a load of statistics, and you’d see him thrive.
This approach is congruent with the manner Borthwick approaches Test rugby; it’s a numbers/statistics based approach, with the belief that if you get those numbers right then you’ll eventually come good.
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However, in England’s performances thus far, the failure has been in winning the big emotional moments rather than a string of statistical objectives. Test matches are often about finding the mental toughness to make the right play in the crux period of the match. This has been England’s failing time and time again and that alludes to the comfort of the current national gig being just a little too cosy for the incumbent players.
Eddie Jones once remarked that he couldn’t energise players, whose biggest setback was ‘detention at Millfield School’ to match lived-in emotional experiences of players like Siya Kolisi and Makazole Mapimpi, who had experienced tough and often tragic formative upbringings. Jones took players so far out of their comfort zone to overcome this they often needed GPS to find their way back – in the Borthwick era, they appear to have someone holding their hand leading the way home.
Put simply, there’s a happy medium and England are yet to find it.
Winning
How many times have we, the press, stood in a presser with the England team management after a loss and been told about progress against objectives, weight of positive statistics, on the right journey and so on? The answer is – many. It’s a default answer to the simple question of ‘how did we manage to lose that yet again’?
The wider question is do the coaches value objective statistical measurement over and above the simple measure of winning or losing? And that is a query that remains unanswered by deed, if often reassured by word.
Do the current coaching team have the experience of winning at the highest level to disseminate to their charges? That appears to be a massive issue right now and one where cultural change from the leadership is needed to cascade an example down to the players.
In-game thinking
Having skirted around culture and measurement, you then have to look at how in-game thinking has been largely informed by statistics over rugby ‘feel’.
Out of the 10 ‘Big Four’ losses England have suffered under Borthwick, seven of them have one thing in common; the team were ahead on the 60 minute mark. That alludes to a couple of points – firstly, that the bench changes removed momentum, and secondly, that the bench players did not meet the standards of those of their opponents. It might allude to a fitness issue, but the likely truth is it’s a combination of all three of those issues.
The substitutions are often informed by statistical analysis of the player via real-time GPS feeds. Call us old fashioned, but rugby feel has to be part of this too, and that, we believe, is an issue. Had Marcus Smith stayed on against New Zealand in the summer, the likelihood was England would have won. Ditto Dan Cole and Joe Marler against South Africa in the semi-Final, where the men that replaced them fell off a cliff in comparison to the performances of England’s two veterans. You could also factor in emotional performance here too – you could bet your bottom dollar that in the instances named, the players concerned wanted to finish the job they’d started and would have dug deep to mine the energy needed to conclude their work.
The perplexing thing here is that England are not appearing to learn from losses – and have chosen to repeat this error time and time again, a key reason why they have failed to kick on under Borthwick.
Selection
The Premiership is a great product – it’s attractive, it’s flowing and it’s high scoring; often by design as Premiership Rugby Limited (PRL) want to bring the crowds in. At Test level, winning puts bums on seats over and above anything else, and at the highest echelons, the game is still largely a collision based affair, with set-pieces and gainline domination the keys to Test success.
Based on that a key question is does the Premiership produce high quality Test players? For sure, it produces some, but the key takeout here is that the style of player who thrives at domestic level might not always be the man that succeeds in the Test environment.
Go back to the comments about the bench impact; the wider EPS, correctly, rewards domestic performances. With some of the cream of English rugby talent, the big physical players like David Ribbans, Jack Willis and Joe Marchant, estranged due to their choice of playing in the Top 14, there’s little doubt that Borthwick’s squads more or less select the best Premiership players in England.
But does that make them the best Test players?
As one simple example, Charlie Morgan wrote a brilliant piece about the surfeit of classical opensides in the game right now – the Underhills, Earls, Pearsons, Currys and Pollocks of the game – and, as always, he’s right about this. However, Test rugby’s power demands have seen the role of the back-row evolve massively – to behemoth, lineout dominating, collision winning giants like the Argentinians, the French options and of course South Africa. The game has moved on and a classical seven, great in D and brilliant over the ball, doesn’t win the collisions that are needed in the modern game. Sure, the highly skilled players that offer continuity in attack like Josh van der Flier or Wallace Sititi, both smaller back-rows by modern standards, still thrive. However, the notion of the 2019 ‘Kamikaze Kids’ is obsolete, and the game now has an emphasis on the super athlete at Test level, and England need to look beyond that traditional view of a seven and project into the benchmarks of the top sides they face at Test level. The same applies to centres and locks, where physicality is the base ingredient of every Test rugby dish.
The way ahead
To right all of the issues, including the 60 minute drop off, selection has to be based on greater power and a fusing of the right personnel in the right roles. A view on getting poundage and physicality in the last 20 must be at the height of the coaching mind. And, alongside that, there has to be an effort to find Test players – not good Premiership players, but those with the attributes needed to play Test rugby.
Above all, we cannot be dazzled by the internalised view of a domestic competition without top quality players from Ireland, France, New Zealand and South Africa. Those are the teams that England need to beat and finding the Test animals to do so will take a lot more than basing selection on Premiership numbers and the experiences French-based players bring from the Top 14 is crucial to England’s growth, if only they sort out a method of picking them.
England have vast resources; winning against teams that, in years past, might have pushed them all the way, is a given. The self-prescribed targets for England are to be a top three/two ranked side, and this is eluding them by some distance in a field that is becoming more and more separated by the elite and the not-so-elite. 2024 is a season of reckoning for Borthwick and England and failure is not an option.
