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'First time in a while I’d seen weight of shirt feel heavy on players'
By Liam Heagney
Steve Borthwick has claimed that his England players felt the weight of wearing their country’s shirt for the first time in a while in their underwhelming 21-30 Guinness Six Nations loss to Scotland. The English had gone to Edinburgh last month looking to confidently build on their best start to the championship since 2019.
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Instead, they squandered an early 10-point lead, becoming unnerved by the galloping Scotland who grabbed a deserved nine-point victory off the back of a Duhan van der Merwe try hat-trick.
The insipid manner of the defeat has left England fans fearing that the 2024 championship will now peter out in the same way last year’s tournament did with losses to the Irish and the French.
That would leave the English mulling over a fourth successive campaign in which they would have won just two of their five matches.
Borthwick could have reacted to what unfolded in Scotland by making wholesale changes to host the Irish this Saturday in London.
However, he limited himself to making just three – Immanuel Feyi-Waboso and George Martin being promoted from the bench along with the recall of the fit-again Alex Mitchell.
After confirming his selection, he insisted continuity in the team he picks was an important factor as was the sense he felt in the last fortnight that those players beaten in Edinburgh were determined to now make amends.
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“Continuity in selection is one very important factor and as we build this team, as we go forward, it’s an important factor for consideration,” he suggested. “We know in the Scotland game there were errors. It was probably the first time in a while I’d seen the weight of the shirt feel heavy on the players.
“We have worked around that and worked to develop that. We made some errors and when we made the errors we started playing differently.
“You saw the way we started was how we intended to play but as you start getting away from the plan of how you want to play, it leads to more errors.
“Now I have made a couple of changes to the team but I believe in these players. I believe they are determined to put in a performance this weekend. I have sensed that determination ever since the end of that Scotland game because there was disappointment. A lot of players were disappointed with how we had gone. We all were.”
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He added: “We try to make an environment here where the players enjoy it, an environment here where we know mistakes are going to be made, but we need to keep doing the right things. I back the players.
“Yes, we made errors. We are disappointed in the performance and we are disappointed in the result. But I also think this is a group of players who made enormous progress over the last year and now we have started the next step of the journey in this Six Nations.
“The continuity in selection is an important factor. When I track this back and look at the continuity of selection over the last few years it potentially has not been as evident and has not always helped the team to have lots of changes regularly. This is the right team for this weekend.”
Borthwick didn’t agree that England being set to miss out on the title yet again was a reason for despair. “Since 2003, I believe Ireland have won more championships, Wales have won more championships and France have won more championships than England so there is something not being done right for a consistent period.
“What I can influence is this team and make sure we build a team that we believe is going to take the right steps now to get the team right for where we need it to be.
“Bringing young players through is an important aspect of that. Continuity is a factor within that, developing the player, making sure we have the right coaching, all those factors to ensure this team can get where we want to go.”
Skipper Jamie George also dwelt on the error rate in Scotland ahead of England’s round four meeting with title favourites Ireland. “When we reflect on that Scotland game, the most disappointing for me as a captain of that team is how we deviated from what we wanted to do.
“We have spoken quite openly about not being afraid of making errors but you repeat those errors back to back, then that becomes a bit of an issue and off the back of that, we maybe went a bit individual at times, probably tightened up a little bit which is what Steve is alluding to.
“The main focus for us the last couple of weeks, in particular, has been around making sure that we can be ourselves, making sure that it is still okay to make mistakes but that we are going to learn very quickly from those because we are a team that wants to push things, we want to see where we can take things.
“Like Steve said, the blueprint of how we wanted to play against Scotland and then that first 20 minutes was outstanding. The way we acted on that game plan was great but the disappointing thing was we gifted them a lot and that was largely down to people straying away from the plan.
“We have got to make sure we are very clear on what we want to do and we have got a lot of respect for Ireland, but at the same time we have got a very clear plan on how we want to try and beat them.”
Continuity means playing the same players who failed previously. Clarity in selection of the best players available is better under Bwick than Jones but the clarity of a game plan with the best players is still missing and again we have a captain who is not neccesarily the best player in his position. Be like Gatland and trust younger players.