When it comes to formulating a gameplan the first fundamental question is, are you going into matches looking to be hard to beat or are you approaching them trying to win? During my time with England in the Six Nations, the approach was always to be hard to beat and, from what I’ve seen this summer, the coaches have doubled down on that for the World Cup.
Whether you think that’s the right mindset or not, that’s your opinion but they’ll be banking on the fact they can stay in games and manufacture enough opportunities they can take advantage of to build their way through the tournament.
Wales away in the Six Nations is a good example of how it can come off – we took our chances that day– but in the warm-ups England’s 22 efficiency has been really poor, they’ve been able to get down there through their set piece and kicking game but have almost tripped themselves up, slowed themselves down rather than speed things up. That’s been disappointing.
It has been a poor preparation. Everyone can see the frailties and the weaknesses pretty clearly but England will have the bedrocks of being hard to beat. They’re still a territory-driven team. A kick-first team that will wait for that speed of ball and, once they’re into the 22, that’s when they’ll start to attack.
There is not a lot of time to change and adapt gameplans. Scotland, France and Ireland are three-to-five years down the track ahead of England. That probably shapes their mindset as they go into the World Cup.
It all comes down to who you pick. You’ve got to look at your cattle, as they say, what suits the players we’re picking? If you’re going to pick Marcus Smith or Joe Marchant or Henry Arundell, a kicking game is probably not going to suit them, so you need to have an ability to play a different way. Or have a different mindset.
But that’s a hard thing because it’s very easy to just talk about that but you have to live it. Your actions, your behaviours, how you talk about the game, how you train, it all has to align to that mindset of the style of play you want. It’s very hard to just flick the switch from one style to the other, week to week. Not many teams do that, certainly not the best in the world – they are all aligned on a style they want to play and pick the players who can carry that out.
England have players who do it the Leicester way, the Saracens way, the Northampton way, the Bristol way, the Quins way, and it’s hard to get them all aligned – but that’s the art of coaching. Selling the plan, getting them to believe in it, training it and then executing it. Wins give validation. Success can give you that and not having success means you question it. That’s when you have to keep selling it.
If I am looking for positives, what they have done is stuck to a plan, stuck to the way Steve Borthwick and the coaches believe will win Test matches. They started that when I was there during the Six Nations and when you haven’t got a lot of time you have to improve some areas of the game quickly to be competitive.
During the Six Nations, that was get your defence sorted, get your kicking game sorted, get your set piece sorted and the attack comes on the back of that. They’ve got the tools and the players to execute a kicking game. At times England have created some nice things but consistently they haven’t been able to convert 22 entries into points.
I had a week with the team before the first Six Nations match against Scotland to come up with an attacking plan and a system, and that is not a lot of time. Attack is a very detailed and difficult thing to get right in a week. I felt we attacked really well in that game, we created a lot of opportunities, we had a lot more possession than we thought we’d get and it was through a couple of defensive errors we ended up losing that game.
There was no attacking system before that, so it was a basic system in terms of how we deploy the forwards across the field. We tried to work on how we could speed up our rucks. We played with Smith and Owen Farrell at 10-12 and tried to move the ball a bit more. We attempted to use edge forwards in the wider channels a little bit more, so you saw Lewis Ludlam and Ollie Chessum out there and it allowed us to fill the field. We were trying to isolate forwards in the middle of the field, suck them in and create space out wide.
England have found themselves with a bit more possession but they haven’t been able to nail those 22 entries. There are issues around breakdown, allowing teams to slow the ball, and the forwards have not been able to create consecutive quick rucks to keep defenders on the back foot. There are a lot of teams playing better at the moment and that’s the big worry.
Their set piece has been pretty good, their scrum has improved from the Six Nations and generallythey’ll have a good lineout. The defence has been an issue, I think they’ve conceded 30 tries in nine matches. That’s disappointing from the defence coach Kevin Sinfield’s point of view but I’d imagine that will improve.
What we have to realise is that things tighten up in a World Cup. The games are very tight and physical, the breakdown is contested hotly and it becomes a bit more of a set-piece battle, certainly when you get to the knockout stages.
The draw helps England and the first game against Argentina on Saturday is going to massively dictate what happens. Forget everything that has gone on this summer, if they get a win against Argentina then all of a sudden confidence comes.
