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The appointment I would make to save Steve Borthwick – Andy Goode
By Andy Goode
Steve Borthwick needs help to turn the tide with England in the form of greater experience in his coaching staff – and the RFU should be insisting he gets it. Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, and Borthwick should be looking to surround himself with more experience off his own back, but his employers should be ensuring it happens anyway if he doesn’t.
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It sort of pains me to say it from a Leicester point of view, and hopefully they are in the process of tying him down to a longer term deal, but someone like Michael Cheika would fit the bill perfectly as someone who has been there, done it and got the t-shirt.
You can’t put a price on the experience he has and England are making the sort of mistakes that show that is one of the main areas they are lacking in the environment at the moment. Whether Cheika would be interested is another matter.
Shaun Edwards is another name who everyone always mentions in relation to England but I just don’t see him wanting to make the move, even if things might not be going quite as well for him with France as they were a couple of years ago.
Ronan O’Gara would be a phenomenal candidate with his experience of winning back-to-back Champions Cups at La Rochelle, as well as with the Crusaders and Racing 92, but it might be a tough sell to come in underneath Borthwick.
There are other big names from abroad who could be good options such as Dave Rennie, Ian Foster and Wayne Smith. From an English perspective, Graham Rowntree would be another good shout after he left Munster.
Rowntree won the URC with the Irish province and has coached on three British and Irish Lions tours as well as been involved at international level with Georgia. Crucially, he is also available and that could be a pre-requisite for the RFU after seeing so much turnover among assistant coaches.
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This group of players and coaches will learn from what they are going through right now and may well be all the better for it but I don’t think the RFU can afford to just sit on their hands and wait, so they might have to put their hands in their pockets again.
Let’s face it, as good a coaches as Richard Wigglesworth, Kevin Sinfield and Tom Harrison may be, they’ve only had a couple of years of coaching experience in rugby union and that was together at Leicester with their current boss.
Borthwick himself was only a head coach in the club game for two seasons, winning the Premiership with Tigers in his second campaign, so he hasn’t got many miles on the coaching clock either in the top job.
Joe El-Ebd has been parachuted in as England’s defence coach and does have a decade of experience in France but his Oyonnax side – and he is still working for them as well at the moment – are 14th in Pro D2 and it’s not a coincidence that he is a close friend and former university housemate of Borthwick.
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El-Abd is due to join the England coaching staff permanently at the end of the 2024/25 season but it has been an inauspicious start as he balances the defence coach role with his head coaching job at Oyonnax.
It’s all well and good having a close group around you on the coaching staff but you need outside influences and voices that are willing to both challenge you and bring a breadth of experience from different high performance environments.
The two members of England’s backroom staff who arguably had that recently were Aled Walters and Felix Jones and they have exited stage left, or are currently in the midst of leaving in the latter’s case, and there is a dearth of experience there now.
Walters and Jones obviously won the Rugby World Cup with South Africa but also had experience in the Irish system with Munster, and the head of strength and conditioning had spent time in Australia and New Zealand too.
During the 2023 Six Nations, Richard Cockerill was in camp with his decades of experience and combative personality, while Nick Evans also had over five years under his belt as an attack coach at Harlequins and knowledge of New Zealand rugby.
Andrew Strawbridge is the current assistant with the most experience at 60 years of age but his coaching has mainly been at provincial level in New Zealand and with their U20 side.
Borthwick is badly in need of someone in the coaching box with him who can offer the benefit of years of experience, someone he can bounce ideas off and help him tactically as well as with off-field issues and in other areas.
In an ideal world the man himself would acknowledge that and not be concerned about the incoming coach being a threat to his job, but it’s up to executive director of performance Conor O’Shea and chief executive Bill Sweeney to help him see the light if not.
Assuming England get the job done next Sunday against Japan, it will be just five wins from 12 Tests in 2024. Two of those will have been over Japan, one against Italy and one over a Wales side on the worst run in their history.
The win against Ireland at Twickenham was epic and felt like a sign of where this side were heading, but all momentum has been lost since then and it doesn’t get an easier. England open their 2025 Guinness Six Nations campaign with a trip to Dublin before hosting France and Scotland.
Even if they beat Eddie Jones’ Japan, this year will be England’s worst in terms of wins and losses since 2008, the year that Martin Johnson took over from Brian Ashton, with Rob Andrew losing a couple of Tests as interim head coach as well.
Very few people are currently calling for Borthwick’s head but you can bet your bottom dollar there will be a growing number of dissenting voices if England struggle in that tough opening trio of fixtures in next year’s Six Nations.
It’s surely in everyone’s interest to act now and give him as much of a helping hand as possible to ensure that isn’t the case and that means getting on the phone to an experienced coach to join the set-up.
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If England can wait a year, I'd suggest that they have the ideal candidate to act as a mentor to Borthwick already within the RFU setup. John Mitchell has been there, done that and seen it all, is already working for the RFU, is settled in England and I think brings everything that would be needed.
The only problem is that he's got something else to do for the RFU first and should be allowed to focus full time on that til it's done.