Repeat set-piece woe and three other beaten England talking points

Saturday night was gut-wrenching for England. Steve Borthwick’s brisk transformation of his team from no-hopers to Rugby World Cup title contenders in the space of 52 days on the ground in France is a case study of how to nurture green shoots and demonstrate that you can flourish in adversity.

Genuinely, England flew into their Le Touquet-Paris-Plage base camp on August 31 with no one – least of all RugbyPass – imagining they would come within a whisker seven weeks later of dethroning defending champions South Africa and qualifying for next weekend’s final against New Zealand.

Their rugby had been far too shabby when losing five of their six pre-finals matches and they were leaking like a sieve, with 30 tries given up in nine matches in 2023. And yet, there they were, only a monstrous Handre Pollard penalty kick denying them an appearance in the decider after five successive wins in recent weeks.

England v South Africa

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England v South Africa

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Now, all this progress is no guarantee that there will be similar consistency in their results moving into 2024 and the next edition of the Guinness Six Nations.

England’s game plan is still very blunt and needs evolving if they are to become a consistent threat to the top sides every time they play them rather than take the Springboks to the wire in a one-off encounter where the terribly wet Parisian weather was a great leveller.

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However, the initially grave fears that Borthwick didn’t have the nous to deliver as a Test-level head coach have now been allayed.

He will given the leeway to go about his work without having to look over his shoulder in fear of the sack, as would have happened if England had crashed and burned at the World Cup and failed to make it out of their pool.

Here are the RugbyPass talking points following a dramatic night at Stade de France:

Set-piece woe repeated
The RugbyPass match preview warned about how England’s set-piece let them down when they last faced South Africa. They were just three from seven at the scrum and six from nine at the lineout on their own ball, they conceded 13 penalties and also gave up 14 turnovers in an Autumn Nations Series match they were to lose 27-13 at Twickenham 11 months ago.

So, what were the English numbers this time around? They were three from seven on their own scrum ball, seven from 10 at the lineout, conceded 14 turnovers and gave up 11 penalties.

For context, the South African numbers were seven from eight at the scrum, 15 from 19 at the lineout, 17 turnovers but just eight penalties conceded. The game was ultimately defined by the scrum, an England infringement giving Pollard his kick to win.

Borthwick, though, refused to get caught up in a debate over what unfolded. “Now is not the time to be talking about things like that. Now is the time just to have the overall reflections,” he deflected.

One thing that can’t go unmentioned about the level of the penalties conceded is how first-half verbals from skipper Owen Farrell resulted in referee Ben O’Keeffe marching them back 10 metres, a decision that put Manie Libbok in range to land a kick from distance. Very costly words in a one-point game!

Sky war success but ruck way too slow
Richard Wigglesworth made a fascinating observation on Friday. “I don’t think anyone should apologise for being who you are and having your identity. Sometimes it feels like people want that apology and everyone play the same way,” he said at his eve-of-match press conference.

“The game of rugby is brilliant because of all the different styles and they all work if you get it right on the day. We need our style to work for us.”

England’s DNA, as previously outlined by Courtney Lawes, is a strong defensive backbone allied to being an aerial kicking team who feel they are very good at getting the ball back and then looking to build their attack off that.

They lived up to this description by being aerially excellent under the wet ball against South Africa. Of their 45 kicks from the hand, 15 went to touch and one was charged down.

That left 25 infield kicks and England regathered 11, an enviable 44 per cent ratio that surpassed what the opposition achieved in this facet of the game.

The Springboks had 29 kicks from the hand, putting 10 in touch, and of their 19 in-field kicks, the ball was regathered on just five occasions (26 per cent).

The trick for England going forward is getting more of an attacking reward from what follows after they regather as Saturday was ultimately their second tryless outing in six World Cup matches.

Ruck speed was a major hindrance. England’s average was 6.73 seconds and just eight per cent of their 68 rucks had a speed of between zero to two seconds. In contrast, South Africa’s average was 4.88 seconds and 20 per cent of their 55 rucks were in the zero to two seconds category.

The consequence? England didn’t make a single linebreak, the first time in the entire tournament’s 46 matches that a team made zero linebreaks in a game.

Borthwick’s flawed 23-man game
Another aspect mentioned in the RugbyPass preview was how we were unconvinced about Borthwick’s sudden greater emphasis on the merit of his England bench after he opted to only pick regular starters Ellis Genge and Ollie Chessum as subs with a view to clinching the game in “Q4” as he now calls it.

Genge and fellow sub prop Kyle Sinckler won’t want to be reminded about how the scrum battle was lost with them in the front row, while Billy Vunipola’s underwhelming cameo involved two knock-ons and poor positioning at the lineout break that produced the game’s sole try for RG Snyman.

Meanwhile, Theo Dan was an unused sub for the third successive match while George Ford was only ushered onto the field with England in arrears and two minutes left to play. Ollie Lawrence was also only a 74th-minute introduction.

Compare that frustration with the immense bang for buck the Springboks had from their canny ‘bomb squad’ use. Jacques Nienaber was ruthless in hooking Libbok nine minutes from the interval, but such brutality is a reason why they are champions.

Six more replacements were used by the 51st minute, with the likes of skipper Siya Kolisi, Eben Etzebeth and Duane Vermeulen all taken off, and the bench was empty with Vincent Koch’s 56th-minute introduction. Now that’s what you call a 23-man game, not the version Borthwick put forward.

Youthful fling
Borthwick was very prickly post-game on Saturday night, insisting he wouldn’t be providing any specific analysis of the match and that if people wanted answers on that front to come back to him later in the week.

He did offer up one statistical nugget, though, and it was to do with the make-up of the match day 23s fielded by the weekend’s four semi-finalists.

“In that (England) 23 today, there were seven players 25 or under, the most of any semi-finalists. South Africa had one 25 or under, so there is a great blend within this squad and there will be lots of things we can take forward,” he reckoned.

A glance at the teamsheets showed him to be spot on: England did indeed have seven (25-year-olds Tom Curry and Ben Earl, the 24-year-old Lawrence, the 23-year-old Chessum, and 22-year-olds George Martin, Freddie Steward, and Dan).

Argentina checked in with six 25-and-unders (25-year-old Santiago Carreras, 24-year-olds Thomas Gallo and Santiago Chocobares, 23-year-olds Mateo Carreras and Lucio Cinti, and 22-year-old Juan Martin Gonzalez), New Zealand had four (25-year-olds Ethan de Groot and Will Jordan, and 23-year-olds Tamaiti Williams and Fletcher Newell), and South Africa just the one (the 25-year-old Damian Willemse).

A curiosity about that list is that three of the four New Zealanders are props. Their youth makes a mockery of the old adage that it’s a position for much older, experienced players, but might this be something the Springboks can exploit to their advantage in the final? We’ll soon know.