As Dan Cole prepares to take the field at a fourth World Cup against Argentina on Saturday, the veteran tighthead prop has cause to reflect on his previous three. Inevitably, it is his first that sticks in the mind, the ill-fated 2011 tournament in New Zealand. He did not jump into the Auckland harbour, as Manu Tuilagi infamously did, but as Cole confesses: “I held his phone.”
When it comes to striking the balance between avoiding cabin fever at a lengthy tournament – if England reach the last weekend in France they will have been here for two months – and going off the rails, their campaign 12 years ago was a salutary lesson in how not to do it. “One of the things I’ve learned, particularly with 2011, you can come along for the ride,” says Cole, who is poised to start on Saturday. “You turn up, think it’s brilliant to be at a World Cup and you just turn up, train, and think: ‘We’ll enjoy somewhere new,’ and you can get lost in the experience. Or you turn up like 2019 and now, and dive into the World Cup in terms of: ‘We’re here for a purpose.’
“Yeah, we’re in Le Touquet and we’re here and we need to relax and enjoy it, but everything comes back to [the rugby], whereas when you’re young, like I was in 2011, everything just washes into one. ‘Oh, we’re in Auckland; oh, we’re in Queenstown,’ and you just go along with the flow and it’s only afterwards when you look back and think: ‘We fucked it up.’ As a young person you learn. The squad learned what you can and can’t do. If you decided to do that type of stuff you hurt the squad. It does not last for you for the day. It lasts for the rest of your career.”
England were hosts in 2015 and four years later in Japan the squad managed to find a much better balance. Cole believes it is a similar case in France, where extracurricular activities have been limited to bike rides down to the beach in their sleepy seaside resort.
“We’ve always been told there’s a trust,” adds Cole. “If you fuck up, you’re out, basically. So no one fucks up. Or tries not to. Some people do differently to others, some are more casual with their evenings, others are more professional but it’s whatever works. Players and coaches know, when you’re on the field there’s no hiding in a 33-man squad. If you’re not ready to go then people see it straight away. No one really wants to be in that position, that’s down to the squad culture, that’s why good teams are good.”
Cole, now 36, is appearing in his fourth tournament because, put simply, Steve Borthwick felt the need to reinforce England’s ailing scrum. After Cole had played 77 minutes of the 2019 World Cup final defeat by South Africa he spent three of the subsequent four years convinced his international career was over but he was given a new lease of life by Borthwick, first with Leicester, now with England.
“You come back from a World Cup and you have got a bit of a point to prove or a grievance,” says Cole. “You have that annoyance in yourself that you want to put things right, as you always do after a loss. That is the way I have been brought through at Leicester and England – you want to put things right straight away and after Steve took over the club he laid down a challenge. If you look at the way the scrum went before the Six Nations I think there’s a lot of mess and not much playable ball and penalties. In the Six Nations, we cleaned up a lot. I think we had some of the best statistics-wise in terms of ball played, penalties won. That’s not only perception but reality that the scrum is changing, which we needed to do.”
Against Argentina, Cole will come up against familiar faces in the hooker Julián Montoya, who captains the Pumas, while the back‑row Pablo Matera also spent time at Welford Road with Cole. There is a perception that the Argentina scrum is not quite the powerhouse it once was but Cole is only too aware of the threat posed.
“I know Montoya from the club, he loves it,” says Cole. “He understands the importance of it for Argentina. There’s definitely a difference but an intensity to the way they do things and how they want to play the game, and it comes through the scrum.
“I remember playing them at Twickenham once and they tried double-shunting us. There’s something different about playing their scrums than there was other scrums. Instead of hit and chase it was more hit and then the whole scrum came together like a squeeze.”
