Steve Borthwick has decided to stick by his England flops for the forthcoming Rugby World Cup in France after a desperate warm-up campaign that culminated in the humiliating defeat by Fiji on Saturday, with Jonny May clinching the one vacant spot in the 33‑man squad.
May scored England’s opening try against Fiji and, after Anthony Watson was ruled out last week, has sealed his place with Borthwick confirming his final squad on Sunday night. Joe Marler is included after escaping a citing for his upright tackle on Fiji’s Albert Tuisue, while England have also confirmed that Alex Mitchell takes Jack van Poortvliet’s place in the final 33.
Borthwick has resisted the temptation to make 11th-hour changes with England on such a poor run of form and included a raft of players who were unavailable for the defeat against Fiji on Saturday.
As a result, Owen Farrell continues as captain and Billy Vunipola keeps his place despite suspensions while Tom Curry (ankle), Kyle Sinckler (chest), Elliot Daly (knee), Henry Arundell (back) and George Martin (knee) are all selected despite injuries that mean they must prove their fitness before England’s opener against Argentina on 9 September.
The finalised squad will head to France on Thursday with World Cup expectations at an all-time low after the 30-22 defeat by Fiji, England’s first defeat by a tier-two nation. Borthwick pinned the blame on England’s dreadful defence – they missed 27 tackles against the Pacific Islanders – and have shipped 23 tries in their past six matches.
The beleaguered head coach refused to engage with the premise that England had hit rock bottom, however, or that they are now facing an uphill task to avoid failing to get out of their pool, as happened when they were hosts in 2015.
“Everybody in that changing room is totally invested in English rugby doing well,” Borthwick said. “Everyone wants this team to go and perform so we are all disappointed by that. What we need to do is ensure we manage the next two weeks as well as we can so we are ready to play against Argentina.
“There are clearly aspects which we have to improve from that game. We will make sure that improvement is in place. I think Argentina pose some different challenges and we’ve been ensuring that our preparation is all about building towards that Argentina game.
“It informs the preparation. It informs us about aspects we need to prioritise our training time upon. It informs us of areas that we think we have developed and areas that we haven’t, which gives us feedback on the training week, so that informs us in that regard.
“My focus is on ensuring we take the lessons from this and that we are right for Argentina. I have been very clear and transparent about my feelings about the performance and my feelings about the result. I am very clear I was disappointed with the defence. We conceded too many tries and we missed too many tackles. I have always been very transparent post-game in this regard. Now our focus is on ensuring we are much better than that against Argentina in two weeks’ time.”
Borthwick also insisted that his players have faith in his gameplan despite three defeats in four warm-up fixtures this summer. Since he took charge, England have lost six of their nine matches and are on a run of five losses in six.
“The players are invested in what we are doing here, I am very clear about that,” Borthwick said.
“As we look at that, what did we see? We saw 27 missed tackles, and handling errors, particular under contestable kicks as we discussed. That’s what we saw. That’s not a plan aspect. Those areas, we have got to look at how we train them to ensure we don’t have those errors again.”
George Ford, meanwhile, has revealed that England are not even up to scratch in training as they seek to make the major improvements needed before locking horns with Argentina. “There’s an urgency that we need to fix it and get better,” Ford said.
“We’ll be honest and upfront about it because it’s costing us at the moment. The way you do that is to be more consistent in training. We’re clearly not consistent in training, there are probably too many errors in training and we’re probably playing the way we train at the minute, which is not good enough obviously.”
