Everywhere England go in France a tennis court is never far away. Next to their training base in Le Touquet is a club where Carlos Alcaraz honed his skills as a youngster and in preparation for Sunday’s match against Japan they have decamped to the famed Mouratoglou academy in the hills above the Côte d’Azur.
As a result, tennis fever has swept through the squad. The scrum-half Alex Mitchell is, by all accounts, the player to beat, but Max Malins is apparently proving to be a natural and giving him competition. Meanwhile, Steve Borthwick announced his side in the US Open room of a team hotel that also contains a grand slam area, but let’s not get carried away just yet.
So how to describe England’s tactical approach in tennis terms? Resilient, certainly, and hard to put away, but they are not the kind of side you would associate with hitting winners. They did not need to be last week – adapting to their early red card to produce a defensive masterclass – but against a Japan side that will surely cause them more problems than Argentina, England will need to address the fact that they have not scored a try in the tournament.
“You get to this level, games are tight,” said Borthwick. “Players have got to find a way to gain advantage one way or another. These players did an incredible job last week in finding an advantage. These guys are big players who rise to the biggest of occasions and I anticipate and expect that these players will find another way on Sunday and will rise again to the big occasion.”
Borthwick has been in an understandably bullish mood this past week. It was even pointed out to him how animated he was – having been palpably edgy in the buildup to the Argentina fixture – and he blushed a little. Courtney Lawes, next to him, had a chuckle to himself and England’s rearguard against the Pumas has largely enabled them to deflect questions over their attack.
George Ford, the architect of last week’s victory, scoring all 27 points, and as the fly-half the man responsible for spreading England’s wings, has urged patience. Ford is a keen student of the game and he sees teams waiting to “pull the trigger at the right time with the ball in hand”.
To return to the tennis analogies, in Ford’s eyes, opponents need to be worn down. “[Tennis is] a bit different because it’s individual but there’s a mental resilience you need,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to watch Wimbledon a couple of times and seen some five-set matches. The concentration you need to play at that level is impressive. You need to be athletically fit, but mentally you see a game on a level playing field that finishes quite quickly after someone breaks.
“It’s not too dissimilar to rugby after 60 or 70 minutes. There’s a bit of a wearing-down process.”
So when did Argentina break last week? “I’d probably say it was somewhere in that first 10 minutes of the second half when we were 12-3 up,” he says. “We managed to go 15 and 18. We were very aware, even being 12-3 up, that the first 10 minutes of the second half was enormous. They could have got the next score, made it 12-10, and it’s whole different game. So we had to go and attack, even with a man down. That first 10 minutes when we got another six, nine points was critical.”
Do not expect England to deviate too far from the script against Japan, then. Last November, in the last victory of Eddie Jones’s tenure, England ran out comfortable winners against Japan at Twickenham after dominating the aerial battle. Though they will no doubt see it coming, it would be foolish of Ford and co not to return to such an effective tactic.
Five years ago against the same opponents, England allowed the game to become too loose, too unstructured and were trailing at half-time. It was a rare occasion when Jones rested Owen Farrell but he was duly summoned from the bench to turn things around. The match has come to be known as the “black hole” game, however, because of the number of careers it either ended or put on hold for years.
That England lost their final warm-up match against Fiji suggests they still struggle against sides they are expected to beat and there is a nagging suspicion that last week’s early setback was a blessing in disguise.
“It’s funny, sometimes when you lose a man like that it almost becomes a little bit simpler, what you need to do,” says Ford. “It simplifies the game a little bit. You want to make it as structured as possible, you don’t want to open the game up because they have got a man advantage.
“There might be a bit more space [against Japan] for attacking kicks if they’ve only got one there and 14 in the frontline. We’ll see.
“I always find this with rugby, you can do your analysis and have your plan but we saw at the weekend, five minutes in it changes. We want to be that team who quickly works out where we can get an advantage and drive that home.”
In other words it will be up to Ford to find a way for England to hit winners. “I loved Federer, how calm and elegant he played the game,” says Ford as the conversation returns to tennis. “As a 10 you want to always look in control and have that calming influence so he was the one I liked watching.”
