There is something very English about fly-halves being hung out to dry in the rain. England did not lose this match because of Marcus Smith, rather they were thumped by a fabulous France team who ruthlessly exposed the limits of Steve Borthwick’s side with an exhibition in how to handle the heavens opening. Still, the cold, hard facts are that Smith did not deliver anything like the statement performance he was selected to do and England’s fly-half debate rages on. The biggest call of Borthwick’s tenure to date can unequivocally be called the most damning of failures.
All the more so when you consider that the No 10 most suited to this kind of match – George Ford – was sent back to his club five days previously and Borthwick’s decision to let Smith do the same a week earlier now looks foolish. England were listing under Eddie Jones but capsized horribly here, suffering a worst ever defeat at Twickenham.
We are just four games into his tenure but Borthwick is now under considerable pressure with a trip to Dublin next. If picking Smith was his most significant decision so far he has plenty more to make in the coming days.
Smith is not the first abundantly talented English fly-half to find himself in this position. Five years ago in Cape Town, Danny Cipriani was finally handed the No 10 jersey by Jones and encouraged to run the show in a monsoon. That he battled through it, and through an obvious reluctance by his teammates to give him the ball, to produce the telling moment of his match was to his immense credit.
Smith, for his part, came nowhere near to following suit but Cipriani’s showing that day came to mind when the former England centre Luther Burrell offered a word of warning beforehand on social media. “I hope Marcus Smith goes well today & plays his authentic game,” he wrote. “I can’t help but wonder has he been set up to fail.”
Food for thought, even if Borthwick does not seem the type, and though hindsight is a wonderful thing, the beauty about weather forecasts is that they let you glimpse into the future. Nick Evans, the current attack coach, has in these pages previously described England as the best wet-weather team in the world. It may have been a few years ago, the head coach and some of the personnel may have changed but there are some players who remain. A particularly notable one of them on the bench.
The point here is that for all that you can commend trying to inject tempo, it was naive in the extreme not to realise that this was the kind of afternoon for a more austere approach. And if England are going to play that kind of way, there is no one better than Ford to steer the ship. Owen Farrell would be a close second but Ford developed into the arch pragmatist at Leicester with a kicking game of such variety that he would have caused France significantly more problems.
The mind spools back to a Leicester match during Borthwick’s tenure last season, against Saracens. It was tipping it down at Welford Road and, because Ford’s kicking game was that little bit better than Farrell’s, the Tigers edged to victory. At the time it was seen as a masterstroke by Borthwick. Not a pretty performance but evidence of how canny a coach he was. This was anything but, an attempt to run before this England side of his can properly walk and they fell disastrously flat on their faces.
You must wonder, though, whether a more roundhead approach from England would have made any difference. France, for whom Antoine Dupont was majestic, were utterly dominant in the first half and content to see the game out with a concerning degree of ease in the second before a late flourish.
There has always been a nagging feeling that for all that Borthwick’s side is likeable, honest and earnest to a fault, good Premiership players will come unstuck against genuine quality. Jones warned that England needed more go-forward from their back-row on his eponymous podcast this week and so it proved – Lewis Ludlam, Jack Willis and Alex Dombrandt comprehensively outplayed by François Cros, Charles Ollivon and Grégory Alldritt.
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This defeat will be hard for England to shake out of their systems because rarely has one change to a team given rise to so much anticipation. Smith’s inclusion was cause for England supporters to quicken their step to the stadium but his first touch was the kick-off, his second was doing so again after Thomas Ramos’s opening try. Defensively he was found wanting for both of Ollivon’s tries, his kicking from hand was wayward and he could not find a way to ignite his outside backs.
There was a glimpse or two of his quality, one late burst up the middle and a cross-kick that Max Malins could not quite gather but it was not until Farrell came on alongside him that Freddie Steward found the try-line. For the briefest of moments, there was a crackle of anticipation: could England mount the kind of comeback seen against New Zealand not so long ago? The resounding answer was no, England’s momentum stymied after a poor knock-on from Smith. It never rains …
