It's a Bristol one-two in Gallagher Premiership monthly awards

I don't think he's so good at orchestrating multi-phase, and for that reason the playmaking balance is wrong even though the individual skill-sets remain very high.

Will Jordan's one is a perfect example. He must have turned his brain off it was just so blatant, impossible to imagine what he was thinking or why he did that. Same with ALB being the fourth person to just complete a tackle on someone who doesn't have the ball, while on a warning for a yellow card - How can you trust this man to select him again when his decision making is so poor? Or lazy off sides where 3 or 4 players every game get pinged for standing half a meter off side - what do you have to gain by doing this? And are any teams penalised more often than NZ for knocking passes down???

Every player is guilty of this too over the course of a couple of games. The only answer is that it is a cultural thing in this team which everyone has just accepted is good enough.

Is it true however that Stuart Lancaster also wanted Wayne Smith as an assistant coach but Smith declined because he didn't want to coach against New Zealand?

Luck is maybe the wrong word, but the ABs attack seems to be built around individual brilliance - they are trying to engineer opportunities for DMac, Jordan, Sititi, Telea etc... to pull something off. They don't know what that thing will be but they hope that given enough shots on goal that these players are so good that they will pull something out of the bag.

The Barrett/Jordan try is an exception. That was very well worked. They kept going side to side until they got the defensive picture they needed then pulled off the play perfectly.

The upside of this approach is that it's hard to defend against. The downside, which we are seeing in every game, even the 10 try fest against Japan, is very long periods of the game without the ABs scoring any points. They don't seem to be prioritising building pressure and being able to collect points and gradually turn the screw - It's all or nothing on every play with a binary outcome - score a try or a turnover.

And agreed. Cool animals. So long as you don’t swim into one of their mouthes.