France - Japon : Gaël Fickou remplaçant, une première sous Galthié

I’m not sure having the guy who cost you the last game you lost to the ABs in the side as a consultant is a hot idea. Poor timing.

6 Nations. Maybe. This is a bad omen for the Irish.

Upgrading my prediction from ABs by 1 point to ABs by 5 points.

I've got no issue with a methodical, kick heavy, defense centric gameplan. That playstyle won England our only world cup and it's won SA 4 of them. However! You can play in a pragmatic manner but you have to still play heads-up rugby and have the ability to turn it on when you manufacture prime attacking situations. England work very hard to get in the right areas of the pitch and have no idea how to convert when they get there, hence we tried and missed 3 drop goals as we were completely impotent in the 22. I've not seen any improvement in our attack in the last 4-5 years. The only time we got close to the tryline was from an interception, it's embarrassing. I don't know what Richard Wigglesworth is getting paid for.

I agree that England should have found a way to close out that game. Being able to grind out tough games is critical but I'd argue that being unable to string more than a couple of passes together without dropping it and finding a way to get over the gainline is even more important... But frustratingly, they don't seem interested. All you hear is about how close we are to bring a great team, we just need to execute a bit better. I don't see it. I see a team who are very physical, very pragmatic who do some stuff really well and are useless with the ball in hand which adds up to a very average side. They need to stop focusing on getting 5% better at the stuff we're already at an 8/10 level and focus on getting a lot better at the stuff we're doing at a 2/10 level. We have the worst attack of pretty much any side in the world... Argentina, Scotland, Fiji are way more threatening.

I stand to be corrected but the ABs have never won a game in which a jet plane was flown overhead the stadium before kickoff.

Unfortunately the last quarter of the game against NZ demonstrated failure of the basics. Regardless of the substitution activities (which made little sense), the paucity of real try scoring opportunities (which is an obvious problem), and the inability to prevent NZ tries (which were well-constructed, to be fair), the telling thing about the game was that England somehow found themselves in a position to close it out with basic execution, but could not make it happen.

This is the opposite of evidence for solid foundations. Good teams raise their games in critical moments, and when it matters theyy win the arm wrestle by consistently getting the little things right.

I had a lot of time for Borthwick when he came on board. But on the strength of the last England performance I don't see that he is performing at the required level.