Rewind the clock to just under a year ago and England players were heading back to their clubs with their tails between their legs after consecutive defeats to France and Ireland and having been chastised by Steve Borthwick for not being fit enough. The head coach’s concern was the shape in which they arrived at the start of the Six Nations and he made it clear to his troops that England would not be able to waste time focusing on fitness when they began World Cup preparations.
Borthwick’s indictment did not go down brilliantly around the clubs but the point he was making was obvious – that he had no control over his players when they were not on England time. Fast forward to the present and there are no such concerns over England’s fitness. Against Ireland, and judging by the way they finished the match, it would now appear to be a strength.
The most obvious change is the arrival of Aled Walters as head of strength and conditioning last summer. At the World Cup he revealed how the disappointing warm-up results were due to the fitness regime he had introduced to ensure the squad would be ready for the competition proper. As England prepare to finish their Six Nations campaign on a high in France this weekend the Welshman has reflected on the improvements that have been made.
“I came in during the summer and I thought their attitude was excellent,” says Walters. “They really applied themselves to get better and maybe what Steve said at the end of the last campaign stung, because no one wants to be criticised for anything, if it’s attitude or fitness or being able to be the best Test player you can be. That’s where I’ve got to give credit to the players for really applying themselves and getting after it all season.
“When you see how well the clubs have been doing in Europe as well, I think there’s been a shift there. Players came in and I thought: ‘These guys are Test match ready.’ The other part is the way they’ve tailored training. We’ve trained at a high enough level to mean that we are going to get better, but the amount of time we’ve spent on recovery – allowing the players to regenerate properly, using the fallow weeks appropriately – means we can perform.”
Walters talks of collaboration with the clubs, which is promising given the Rugby Football Union’s hybrid contracts are supposed to give Borthwick and his coaches a greater say in the conditioning of the players than they have currently. Details remain thin on the ground and the fact that clubs say they are in the dark as to what tangible changes will be made is cause for concern, but the remodelling of the Premiership season after the reduction to 10 clubs appears to have helped.
“When you’re coming from a Premiership season and European games, they are tapering into those games to freshen up and get those performances just before those games start,” adds Walters. “But the information that we’ve had from the clubs, the collaboration and the relationships that are developing are, I think, good. That allows the players to come in in a good position.”
Whereas Eddie Jones liked nothing more than to pluck a percentage gain, Walters is more circumspect. But whether it be Immanuel Feyi-Waboso’s speed over the ground on Saturday – “comfortably over 10 metres per second” – or Ollie Chessum’s average score of 5:20 for three minutes on a WattBike, which noses him ahead of his Leicester teammate George Martin, Walters, who helped the Springboks to the 2019 World Cup title, is pleased with what he is seeing.
“I can compare them to figures we saw with South Africa a few years ago and we are in a good place at the moment,” he says. “It was nice to see that kind of energy on Saturday. That’s probably the most pleased I’ve been since I’ve been with England. To see the amount of energy and how we were able to stay in anything. I felt that anything Ireland threw at us, we were able to cope with, or at least to come back from it quickly.”
Ben Earl – England’s man of the match in victories over Wales and Ireland – is certainly reaping the rewards. The 26-year-old has, according to the attack coach Richard Wigglesworth, never lacked self-confidence but the back-row has made it his public aim to establish himself as “world class” and is backing it up with performances on the pitch.
“I went down the rabbit hole in terms of the work I did on that at the club and I did with Aled before the World Cup and during the World Cup,” says Earl. “I feel like I really reaped the rewards in that campaign and continue to do so here.
“We feel like going into the last 10 or 15 minutes of any game, as long as we’re well in it, we’re fit enough and have got a good enough bench to come from behind and win games. It’s certainly a strength of ours.”
