You know it has been a long rugby union season when it feels like it kicked off in a parallel universe. Was Fin Baxter even born when Steve Borthwick’s squad assembled for their first pre‑World Cup training camp on 12 June last year? Were those faraway August warm-up Tests some kind of tortured fever dream? No one can accuse England of not having squeezed a huge amount into the past 13 months.
It has been some slog. Sometimes, we can all be guilty of sitting in the stands or on a sofa 12,000 miles away and forgetting sport is played by human beings not robots (not for another couple of years anyway). We only see the most recent snapshot rather than the whole of the moon. So if England did flag slightly in the final quarter against New Zealand, whose actual fault is that? The weary players, the coaches who keep selecting them regardless or, above all, the ludicrous quart-into-a-pint-pot demands of the global rugby calendar?
To some, the answer is largely superfluous. Test rugby remains a results business and England took a host of players with them to Japan and New Zealand who never actually took the field. Sticking with Maro Itoje, who exceeded the season’s supposed maximum player welfare threshold during the first Test, was not contractually essential. You reap what you sow, in this case a 2-0 series defeat to a distinctly mortal All Black side rebuilding under new management.
But hang on. Cast your mind back not to England’s results in the mists of summer 2023 but to the limited gameplan they were pursuing. To the booing at Twickenham after the loss to Fiji? To the dog days of the World Cup pool stages, when George Ford’s drop‑goals and a headed “assist” from Joe Marler were almost the zenith of England’s attacking ambition. Or even to the head-clutching defeat in Scotland less than five months ago. And then ask yourself again: have England, regardless of the series outcome, made any progress in the past year or not?
Anyone with a pair of eyes or a sense of perspective, surely, would say the former. Do you really look at Immanuel Feyi-Waboso and think: same old, same old? Ditto Chandler Cunningham-South, George Martin, Alex Mitchell, Tommy Freeman and, in the first Test, George Furbank? Or watch Ollie Sleightholme skinning a startled Sevu Reece on the outside and conclude this new-age England side has already reached its ceiling?
As Borthwick freely acknowledges, a couple of significant areas urgently need addressing. Tighthead prop is self-evidently one of them: someone has to hold up the crumbling edifice that is the English scrum with even the estimable Dan Cole, now 37 years old, unable to play King Louis’s role in the Jungle Book for ever. More impact off the bench a la Beauden Barrett – another area of All Black superiority in an otherwise tight series – will also be close to the top of Borthwick’s summer agenda.
Rewind the tape, though, and, as well as Fletcher Newell destroying England’s scrum with six minutes left, check out the warm, respectful handshake a clearly impressed Barrett gave Sleightholme after the game. And then wind forward again to this November when the All Blacks will be at Twickenham for the rematch. New Zealand, who have just embarked on their own savage globe-trotting schedule of 14 Tests in 21 weeks, will be up against fresher bodies in hostile conditions with the hobnailed boot on the other foot. Better, perhaps, to reserve judgment on Borthwick’s England until after that and their subsequent autumn games against Australia, South Africa and Japan.
Because no one would dispute that England, as previously stated in these columns, will need to transform narrow defeats into victories sooner rather than later. Four defeats in their last six Tests shows there is clear progress still to be made, even with Courtney Lawes, Owen Farrell, the Vunipolas, Ben Youngs, Danny Care et al no longer available. If someone could conjure up a way to reintegrate the French-based Jack Willis and, possibly, Henry Arundell into Borthwick’s squad – both initially went into exile as a result of their English clubs going bust which makes them special cases by definition – it might also help.
But if I was Borthwick I would also be stressing to his players that the 2-0 series outcome is not the only takeaway from this Test series. All it required was three extra points from almost in front of the sticks in the first Test and a penalty try in the closing moments at Eden Park and the Hillary Shield might have been England’s.
So if you meet a glazed-eyed red rose player gazing dejectedly into his piña colada in a beach somewhere this summer – or park up next to the camper van which the aforementioned Baxter is planning to drive around New Zealand in the coming weeks – be gentle with him. And dwell not on the last-quarter frustration but the excitement delivered across the Tests in New Zealand and Japan and against Ireland and France in the latter half of the Six Nations.
And, once they have disappeared back to their well‑deserved hammocks, ponder afresh the ultimate purpose of sport. If a side reinvents itself in full public view, re-engages with thousands of previously jaundiced fans, tries its heart out from first whistle to last, is led by decent men who transparently care, and commits to learning from its mistakes, do you judge everything on what the scoreboard currently says? By how it might read in one or two years’ time? Or do you simply see the crescent of an endlessly unreachable moon?
