What do England want to be? What are they trying to be? How are they perceived by opponents and what is the identity they are trying to forge? The very fact that these are not easy questions to answer illustrates the predicament for Steve Borthwick’s side with two daunting Six Nations matches remaining.
To frame things another way, try summing up England in a single sentence. For a lot of their rivals it is a far easier task: Ireland are a well-oiled team, relentless and precise. Wales are green but full of fight, Scotland lethal on the counterattack. Beyond the Six Nations, South Africa are a team who knock the front door down, and New Zealand marry speed and skill like no other. But England?
Sam Underhill is one of the squad’s deepest thinkers, among their most articulate players, but he struggled to characterise England this week. “I think it’s hard to have that level of self-awareness,” he said. “You want to be a physical team [with] a massive emphasis around the set piece. We want to have a good defence, it’s historically something we’ve gone after. And the attack stuff, we’re trying to develop and improve. I probably couldn’t tell you what we are, because I’m in it, so I can’t really look from the outside and get that perspective. That’s what I guess we’re trying to look at.”
Part of the problem is Borthwick’s insistence that each game plan is tailored specifically to the opposition. All teams do that to a degree but the constant shape‑shifting makes it all the more difficult to forge an identity and leaves England open to the kind of accusations, made by Will Carling this week, that they are overreliant on data and, by association, what it says about their opponents.
The problem is compounded because England are always striving for cohesion but they have players coming from 10 clubs, all with their own thoughts, ideas and styles. It is a problem we are hearing a lot about this week because Ireland are held up as the opposite, a side for whom cohesion comes so much easier because of their domestic structure.
“You judge us against Ireland – [they] are together for long periods and you look at their attack and it’s phenomenal,” says Dan Cole. “But their players know who’s going to be there because they do it day in, day out, 365 days a year, pretty much. Whereas we have to come together, we have a tournament here, a tournament there, we’ve got new players in squads, people come from different teams playing in different ways – which is great, it’s a strength in the fact we have different diversities of how you play the game. But it’s also a weakness in some regards because you have to get them on the same page, play a certain way that England play, and sometimes it goes against the instinct of a certain player, or a certain club, or a certain team.”
If it is hard to get on the same page then it is all the more difficult to stay on it when things start to go wrong. The capitulation against Scotland was a clear example and it was telling to hear Maro Itoje lambast his teammates afterwards for playing “tip-tap rugby” and “hot potato”. The inference is that some players sought to respond to Scotland’s opening try by playing with abandon whereas others favour a more route-one approach.
It was also a problem during England’s World Cup warm-up campaign when players began to question the restrictive game plan that was not yielding results. But by the time they arrived in France they had adopted a more belligerent attitude in response to the criticism they received for losing at home to Fiji and, as a result, there was a collective buy-in to the kick-heavy game plan. It did not win them many admirers yet at least England were clear on their identity. When Courtney Lawes was asked about it during the pool stages, his response was unequivocal. “We’re a really strong defensive team,” he said. “That’s our backbone. We’re an aerial kicking team and are very good at getting the ball back.”
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Since then England have overhauled their defensive system. They say they are looking to be more expansive with ball in hand yet, according to reports, are spending little time practising it and made a staggering 25 handling errors against Scotland. They have not scored more than two tries in a game since putting Chile to the sword last September and though we hear words like “transition” and talk of World Cup cycles, England are staring down the barrel of a fourth successive Six Nations with only two wins. It is a rut that is proving increasingly hard to get out of and though the Rugby Football Union may think otherwise, but the “hybrid” contracts coming in next season are unlikely to be a silver bullet.
There is an argument, then, that Borthwick ought to have stuck to his guns and persevered with the limited if effective game plan that took them to the World Cup semi-finals. Because without a consistent identity it becomes all the more difficult for players to get on the same page. If they do not have a modus operandi, a bespoke way of playing they can fall back on, then unravelling as they did at Murrayfield becomes all the more likely.
On Saturday they go into the home match as considerable underdogs though it is the kind of fixture that suits England because they will have less of the ball than Ireland and are better at frustrating high-quality opponents, rather than imposing their game plan on them. But Carling is not alone in speaking out of late and the knives are being sharpened. There are different ways to lose but defeat will put Borthwick’s job under genuine scrutiny for the first time.
