Steve Borthwick is expected to retain the support of the Rugby Football Union and keep his job as England’s head coach even if his side bomb out of the World Cup in the pool stages, the Guardian understands.
England begin their campaign against Argentina in Marseille on Saturday with expectations at an all time low after losing three of their four warm-up matches and five of their past six outings. Under Borthwick, England have won only three of nine games, shipping 30 tries along the way and go into Saturday’s match with the Pumas as underdogs.
Given England’s desperate buildup to the tournament however, Borthwick is rated at 9/2 with a leading bookmaker to leave the role before next year’s Six Nations and 20-1 to vacate the job before the end of the World Cup.
Borthwick signed a five-year contract when appointed in December, following the sacking of Eddie Jones, through to the 2027 World Cup and at the time, the governing body’s chief executive, Bill Sweeney, insisted the RFU was implementing a “long-term rebuilding programme”. He also said that Borthwick would not be set tangible targets, rather that it would be a “game by game” appraisal, having said after the 2019 World Cup final that England should perennially be ranked in the top two in the world.
England arrived in France ranked eighth in the world following their first ever defeat by Fiji last month. The RFU did not even open the top tier of Twickenham for that match, so slow were ticket sales, which would have set alarm bells ringing given how important selling out home matches is to the union’s finances.
However, the RFU spent around £1 million to buy Borthwick and his defence coach Kevin Sinfield out of their Leicester contracts after handing Jones a bumper severance package and, with an anticipated £40m shortfall in the RFU’s income this year, sacking Borthwick would be expensive. More importantly, however it is understood that the RFU’s long-term thinking has not changed and it still considers Borthwick’s appointment as a long-term project, even if England fail to advance from their pool. In 2015, when England were knocked out of the tournament they were hosting before the knockout stages, Stuart Lancaster subsequently departed as head coach.
When Borthwick was appointed in December, Sweeney said: “World Cups are hard to win, and you need the rub of the green sometimes as well, so we wouldn’t put any outrageous targets on the World Cup. This is a long-term rebuilding programme, and we want to re-establish England. We’ve talked about this being a new age for England going forward, to make sure we’re laying the right foundations for the right progression for English rugby.”
