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Jake White: If I was England coach, I’d have been livid
By Jake White
It’s a seismic weekend of Test rugby, but for obvious reasons, my laser focus will be on a small part of South-West London, and all is not well amongst the chattering classes in Twickenham’s West car park.
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Why? Because I cannot believe that England can continue to make the same mistakes with the same players and expect different results. I may have pinched a bit of Einstein there, but he had a point.
Funnily enough, I actually asked one of my Bulls players this week, who had played in the Premiership, ‘Why can’t they transfer how tough and attritional that league, week-in, week-out, into how they front up when they pull on the Red Rose. I don’t see the toughness – and I want to emphasise that word – and resilience and it’s a mystery why.
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I know I reference my generation regularly, but you can reel those legends off without missing a beat; Vickery, Thomson, White, Johnson, Grewcock, Dallaglio, Hill, Back, Dawson, Wilkinson, Tindall, Greenwood and so on. Right now, I don’t see any England player now making that team.
They can’t blame naivety either. This is a professional team that has been together for a while. They fielded 861 caps in that 23-man squad against Australia, nearly 40 caps a man, so they can’t waive the inexperience card. Maro Itoje had 85 caps, Jamie George 94, and Dan Cole 116 caps – there should be no lack of leadership on the park. I’m not saying England don’t have the players within their system, they do but maybe they need to look further afield. I don’t want to call out individual players, but I’m not seeing them paying back the loyalty invested in them.
I’d have watched the closing quarter with my hands over my eyes if I was an England fan. As their coach, I’d have been livid if I had been watching that. I’d be thinking. Is it me? Is it the players? Is it the atmosphere at Twickenham? Is it the pressure? Something is missing. I’m also flummoxed by the Felix Jones situation. I understand he’s still being paid by the RFU and yet they’re not tapping into his IP on the Boks. It’s crazy.
I’m also worried about their scrum. It’s funny, in the Southern Hemisphere, when players are left to play for a French or Premiership club, the one thing you were guaranteed they’d improve overseas is their scrummaging and mauling, you know fundamentals of the set-piece. That’s why players go there. When I look at this England team, the one thing they can’t do is scrummage. They are going to get demolished on Saturday by the Bok scrum they can’t stop and they could have 10 training sessions this week, swot up on video analysis and talk about it until the cows come home but I don’t think it will make a difference.
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It’s hard to make excuses for them. The RFU are the richest union in the world. They have a powerful Premiership, and they produce the most players. Where are the players coming through in the wind, cold and rain of a Northern Hemisphere winter. Does English rugby have a soft underbelly? You tell me, but if I was doing an audit on my investment, the RFU are definitely not getting the maximum return on their expenditure. I know Wales are getting a lot of flak right now, but they are still green, and England have the experience and resources, so in a way their failure is more damning.
From a wider lens, the Southern Hemisphere look like they’re dominating. I remember taking the Springboks to the Northern Hemisphere at this time of the year and usually the narrative was we were, ‘lambs to the slaughter’ because England and France were battle-hardened and we were out of shape and out of sync having not played much rugby. If you look now, Fiji beat Wales, Australia beat England, New Zealand beat Ireland, Argentina beat Italy and South Africa beat Scotland. The only win for the North was through France, who were expected to beat Japan. It’s not a full picture, but let’s see how the landscape looks after that final Ireland v Australia game.
All week I’ve been asked about the use of Rassie’s bench. Well, I played golf this week with an old friend. He said, ‘Jake, never underestimate the role of a coach is to win. Winning brings crowds to the stadium and gets supporters to follow the team.’ I agree, but rugby is far more nuanced and the debate around the game is also key. Right now, there’s this 6-2, 7-1 debate going on.
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Isn’t it amazing? A 6-2 bench comes back to bite Gatland and yet Rassie does a 7-1 bench and gets Pieter-Steph to run on the wing for a period while Mapimpi is off the field and survives? I’m not going to say luck, but favour has shone down on Rassie there, but I see he’s not rolled the dice for England and gone with a 5-3 split this weekend.
What do I think about the 7-1 split? Well, I read the journalist Stephen Jones’ comments about the Bomb Squad. What I’d say is that rugby is about confrontation. Modern-day gladiators who challenge each other. As the coliseum builds to a crescendo, the biggest, strongest, fittest and most ruthless gladiator is usually awarded the spoils. Well, switch Rome for a modern-day amphitheatre. If the Springboks are finding holes, through soft shoulders and tired legs in the opposition, I really don’t see the issue.
Right now the Springboks have some great forwards and a strong scrum but you shouldn’t penalise them for that resource. Honestly, I don’t think the game was ever devised for an eight-man bench comprised of seven forwards but coaches will always push the boundaries. People have forgotten that in the old days, there were no substitutes. If you had an injury, you had to play with 13 or 14 players. Some guys had to stay on the field when they were struggling. A hooker and a scrum-half were introduced because they were specialised positions and now it’s gone full circle, you have outside-halves and back-rows running on the wing. You couldn’t make it up.
Finally, I want to touch on the new laws and particularly the escort law. Now the avenue to the catcher has to be open by the defending team but it’s free for the attackers to run onto the player. I think the people who put that law did so in the hope there would be less kicking. They were hoping that the guy who catches the ball would almost give a guaranteed turnover. Perhaps they were hoping teams would kick it longer and it wouldn’t be contestable, yet from early evidence, what will happen is that there will be more kicking because every player who has blocked runners was penalised, which means if you send four players onto that receiver and any of the opposition players are in the way, it’s a penalty. The team kicking has the advantage now. Was that the intention?
And what about the shot clock? It has been brought in to speed the game up but now every kicker of a team that is leading on the scoreboard is taking the full 60 seconds, even if he’s scored under the poles. In the old days, he’d kick it over after 15 or 20 seconds. By enforcing a shot clock, they may have made the game slower again. I don’t blame administrators for trying to improve the game, but there’s never any guarantees in this most complex of sports.
This is what rugby history has always taught us, you make one law tweak to improve the game and you open up an unintended consequence, which can often be a bigger problem. From my standpoint, player welfare has been compromised, which can’t have been the objective. My understanding is that these new rulings will be brought into the URC as of the next round when the Test window ends, so let’s see how that goes.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
It should be pretty easy to find the data on if shot clocks are speeding the game up or not.
"The only win for the North was through France, who were expected to beat Japan" I'm pretty sure Japan is in the NH so hardly surprising a NH team won that game!
Yeah, maybe he should just say non-European instead.
I love when different countries bring different styles and tactics. That's what makes international rugby interesting and exciting. For a while when they were going well, New Zealand was berating everyone to have a kiwi coach, so everyone would play like them, making it easier for them.
The French, being independently minded never embraced it which is why the All Blacks always struggled with France and a few more countries have dumped their kiwi coaches and lo and behold started doing better.
Poor old Wales and Australia are still stuck in the past being All Blacks cannon fodder. How boring is it to have two countries with kiwi coaches come up against each other, like this weekend. It's dull as hell.
Well you’ll enjoy the England vs South Africa game this weekend. It’ll be an absolute thrill fest and barely a kiwi coach involved.
I am not an England fan, but still very disappointed at what Borthwick is serving up. Regardless of winning or losing, they should be executing the basics at a world class level. That was the reason they replaced Eddie with Steve. After two years England has not built the solid foundations that the RFU were presumably after. Its hard to see it as anything other than a coaching problem.
Having said that I really hope that Rassie has got his team fired up for the game. The Boks at maximum intensity and with no crises (eg red cards) would be expected to win this game. But it does not take much reduction in pressure for Bok teams to lose. The Boks lose when complacency sets in.
On Felix Jones, my guess is that they can't agree on a non-compete so they kept him on payroll for the duration of the Nov tests. The risk was that he would be hired by Rassie or Razor prior to the tests.
As relates to law tweaking, it feels like WR are more comfortable discussing changes in laws than insisting on implementation. For my money the biggest thing they could do is to be strict and consistent in officiating ruck behavior. In every game we see flopping, lazy lying, clearing of unbound players, making plays while off your feet, delays in placing the ball, side entry, offside line infringements, and similar nonsense. It's really really bad, and the WR attitude seems to be that we should turn a blind eye in pursuit of "flowing rugby". In truth it's just boring, because it randomizes the outcome.
With the team selection of Rassie, I'm sure you would agree that there is no complacency? He means business. The English selection is as I suspected. They going to kick and bore us to death. However, Rassie chose a team to attack. The English will kick it and the Boks will run it, which will make it hard for the English.
They are not an 80 minutes team, at best 60 minutes. The Boks won't kick much. If I can gauge the Boks tactics over the past 11 Test, they like to keep and run the ball, even out of their own half. Rassie's intentions with this selection is very clear in my eyes.
The English will revert and refer to the WC semi tactics. If they do, they will get punished, unless it rains a lot, which puts a different spin on things.
In regards to the obstruction empahsis on kicking, the receiving team has to clear a path to where the ball is going that one of their team is going to take. If the kicking team member runs into another player that will not mean they gain a penalty unless a direct path to the receiver is blocked.
I suspect the change was brought about to make this aspect of the game safer as chasers will not be bumped into creating a dangerous fall for the player leaping. A good example of this was the red card for a French player against the ABs a few years back. He clattered into B Barrett taking his legs from out under him and landing on his neck/head. Upon review for the citing committee they agreed that ALB had checked the French player causing him to go off course and take Barrett out. No suspension resulted and the red card rescinded. The metric to judge the worth of this change is to see if dangerous falls lessen or not.
Thanks for the article.
The English biggest problem is that whole board. They need to change it, because all they've shown is how incapable they are of running a business which ultimately it is.
The players they choose for the team isn't even the best players in England. There is better players out there just as you suggested and I've said in one of my responses.
This was a well written no nonsense article. An eye opener. Let's hope they read your articles. There is a lot they can learn from someone like you. Just don't dare leave my Bulls as a coach. 2 URC Finals and no cigar. You'd better give those boys gas when they screw up. We want that URC title this year👍
Really like your articles Jake.
With the rule changes I’m astonished at the regularity of Union rule changes. Other sports take it nice and slow and even then it’s a mess e.g VAR. I think the French saying is “plus ca change, plus ca meme choise “
The split bench. Its hilarious. I’m think you are my vintage and you may recall the formidable West Indies bowling attack in the 70’s. If Stephen Jones or Beaumont were commenting on that they would say let’s change the rules as these 6ft7 seamers are ripping into our top and middle order.
Its mad.
Rassie went with a 5-3 split to demonstrate whatever the make up of our bench we are still going to be very difficult to beat. For heavens sake Wilco Louw is our 4 choice tight head. Good grief.
Great article as an England fan. I can't get my head around how poor we are at the moment with all our resources.
Coach Jake, I agree with you. Most law changes are not meant to speed up the game or make the game better. I think it is more of pleasing the men in suits. The issue of speeding up the game brought by most Kiwi pundits is naïve and unpromising. The laws are pedantic and it will be difficult to bring new fans. I think the game should evolve to accommodate more fans, resources and environments. Great article. English rugby is in trouble and RFU has a bigger fish to fry!
Really like your writing, Jake. Agree on England and not getting those hard ass basics sorted out. Difficult to put a finger on it and all I'd venture is that those England legends were what Malcolm Gladwell might call "outliers" - timing, coincidence etc.
What I like about Rassie is that clearly he "has the dressing room" and he's building such a squad of depth and belief. And he doesn't give a rip for what others thing - winning (and actually winning well). Also great to see such a multi-cultural approach.
Paying the oldies of the English team upfront - prior to performance - certainly didn’t help hardening them up, Jake.
I can tell you now, hand on heart, you pay me my salary for the year upfront and I’m a goner.
Just look at Felix Jones...
Livid? His coaching team is a joke, consisting of his mates from Leicester and his old flatmate from Uni. They look disorganised and bereft of ideas.
Luckily for Australia .....