In the coming weeks, under the cloak of anonymity upon which they apparently insist, the Rugby Football Union’s panel of experts will convene to review the World Cup campaign. Players will be invited to give their feedback, presentations will be made to board members, and boxes will be ticked.
To save them some time, file this campaign under “disaster averted”. An ageing, proud squad gave it a lash but ultimately came up short against the eventual champions. The RFU chief executive, Bill Sweeney, said: “I think we did a brilliant job of managing expectations.”
Credit to Steve Borthwick for formulating a plan inside 10 months – however limited – that took his side to within a point of the Springboks, but do not be fooled that English rugby is back on an even keel. Reaching the semi‑final after a dismal Six Nations and even worse warm-up campaign was a victory for bloody-mindedness, a platform from which to build, but it papers over considerable cracks across the domestic game.
A host of senior players are calling time on their international careers, Borthwick has a tranche of younger players around whom to build when it comes to the Six Nations next year – none more so than Ben Earl, England’s standout player in France – and, while he is said to favour evolution rather than revolution, it will be a squad in transition. The coaching staff too because Felix Jones, fresh from a second World Cup triumph with South Africa, is arriving and Kevin Sinfield is expected to depart.
“Steve and the coaching team came in last December and the meticulous way he goes about planning and preparing the team showed through,” Sweeney said. “It’s been a great job by Steve. We said it would be a long-term commitment when we first took him on, and we think he’s done a great job in this tournament.”
The challenge, though, for Borthwick is that he is to a large extent starting all over again. He was able to take a short‑term approach for the World Cup – and did so effectively – but in the long term supporters will not put up with a gameplan in which England kick away 93% of their possession. England’s limitations in an attacking sense were again exposed in their bronze final win against Argentina and there are layers to be added before Borthwick succeeds in reconnecting his team with supporters.
Sweeney said: “Winning matters, doesn’t it? If you’re winning matches it’s easier to forge that bond. I can tell the players want a close connection with the fans. They don’t see themselves being separate from them. I think we said coming into this tournament that we wanted to really connect with the fans again and that’s clearly high on Steve’s radar as well. We’ll look at any and all ways we can to do that.”
It is a challenge for Borthwick because he must do so against the backdrop of malaise in the English game. The Premiership is three weeks in, Bath and Exeter are enjoying respective resurgences in the early weeks of the season but the competition is still reeling from losing three clubs in the past year. Players will go straight back to their clubs – there are no mandatory rest periods which seems astonishing given the first training camp for the World Cup was in mid-June – but the fact that only 10 teams contest the Premiership this season at least makes for fewer matches for Borthwick’s exhausted squad.
All the while, discussions continue around the Professional Game Partnership. The “hybrid” contracts that would give Borthwick greater control over 25 players is the biggest headline to date but details remain thin.
Sweeney has revealed that talks are under way with Premiership Rugby whereby players could be moved between clubs, if one has an abundance of specialist positions, in order to gain more game time. It is easy to imagine how that may go down with a few of the more trenchant club owners but Sweeney insists discussions are positive.
“One of the things we are having conversations with PRL about – in a very positive way – is that if you have one club with an abundance of hookers, for example, and other clubs who don’t, we have to look at how we can move them around so we get real positional strength in depth. “It is tricky, but I think we will be able to achieve that.”
Certainly it could be a significant step because England’s defeat by South Africa highlighted how there is a concerning lack of depth in some positions. In the front row Borthwick had to turn to Dan Cole, 36, and Joe Marler, 33, to spearhead a scrum to match the Springboks and when they went off England’s set‑piece went to pieces. Jamie George played all 80 minutes in three consecutive matches in this World Cup and, while a fit Luke Cowan-Dickie would have made a significant difference, hooker is a problem position. So, too, inside-centre.
Sweeney points to positive results at age-grade level but also acknowledges the problem that youngsters in England face a bottleneck. That they are starved of minutes on the pitch compared to their counterparts in France and England will continue to pay the price in the first part of the next World Cup cycle for neglecting the importance of talent development.
“The sort of conversations we are having around the academy structure now is that it’s in all of our interests to have a successful international team and it’s in all of our interests to have better quality club players,” Sweeney said. “You’ve seen that in France. They have built their success on that crop of young players like [Antoine] Dupont who have come through. They have carefully nurtured those players through. A lot of our young players just aren’t getting the right amount of game time.”
The planned resurrection of an England A team would also help while Conor O’Shea, the RFU’s executive director of performance rugby, has been in Paris recently to discuss how France have unearthed a “completely different athlete pool, in an urban centre”. As Sweeney admits, that is chronically overdue in England. “We’ve been talking about that for a long time but we haven’t done it, and we need to do things like that to broaden the skill base.”
Borthwick, however, cannot sit around and wait. He has been compared to Alan Turing and Spock already this month, while Sweeney likened him to a “professor” and he says he has been taking notes during the World Cup with a view to the Six Nations, now less than 14 weeks away. Finishing third in France has bought England some goodwill but this post-World Cup period was always going to make or break Borthwick’s tenure.
