Mike Blair reacts to Edinburgh's heavyweight Champions Cup draw

One problem for Doris currently is the form of Jack Conan. Conan is basically playing anywhere just to get on the pitch and is starting tonight at 8 vs Glasgow.

It’s an interesting thing to consider. Neither Doris nor Itoje are hugely experienced captains, but the argument could be made that Maro has more experience at the top given his amount of international caps and previous Lions involvement.

Both will be leaders in the pack regardless. Whoever is captain has to be a nailed on starter though. It’s not that outlandish to namecheck the current England captain as a potential tour captain really given Farrell only has a few options in front of him.

NZ prob learned more because Schmidt came in, and he was far more familiar with developments in Ireland than any of the local coaches.

England up to Ireland 2024 tended to kick back rather than return. Their KR improvement coincided with both trhe intro of Furbank at 15, and Felix Jones running a more aggressive form of D.

France are good kick returners, but most of the work on that is done by the coaches at Toulouse and UBB, who have adopted a similar style.

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Stay vigilant,

Tulijuana Cutler

“England post-2023 have been pretty good on KR’s esp when they started to pick either Marcus or Furbank at FB.”

completely true, but not at all the point I was making. England in 2023 were brilliant at generating turnovers, but they were not brilliant at converting them into chances - so very clearly scoring loads of tries off turnovers isn’t purely (or perhaps even primarily) a product of aggressive defence. The point about Furbank and Smith actually kinda proves my point - neither player contributes much to England’s defensive linespeed, and yet they do contribute to tries being scored off turnover!

“he was the 26th worst ranked tackle success % in the 6n”

Yeah I don’t care about that. Defending at 15 is mostly about fielding high balls, which he is bad at. He can tackle alright, which is more useful at 10 than at 15, but here he’s a long way off the level of Fin Smith.

“how do you account for him having more try assists for Eng since debut, than smith, ford, farrell and slade combined”

he gets a lot of try assists because he makes a lot of breaks. It is generally easier to get an assist when the defensive line is already beat. He is good at getting assists. Better than Smith and Ford in fact. But that isn’t all there is. How do you account for how little the outside backs touch the ball when he starts at 10? How do you account for how badly england play whenever he starts at 10? How do you account for the fact that England’s centres and outside backs never play well when he starts?

Fly-half is somewhere England could do with a bit of depth. Ford won’t be around forever, and Marcus is nowhere near the level of Fin. Given Donoghue is also able to play 15, he could be an excellent back up option.

It also feels significant that Will Butt is starting ahead of Ojomoh. I said at the start of the 6N that Butt could potentially start for England at 12 in the near future, but the general consensus seemed to be that he was behind Ojomoh in the pecking order - that might not be the case!