Always leave them wanting more. For a fixture that comes around every four years or so, the anticipation for the next instalment of England versus New Zealand is already palpable. Marcus Smith’s decision to take the draw added to a strange mix of exhilaration and anticlimax at full-time and it was left to Maro Itoje to try to make sense of it all. “Why can’t we play like that for the whole game?” he wondered. Sometimes the most obvious questions are the hardest to answer.
First, it pays to go back four years to the All Blacks’ previous visit and a similarly thrilling finish. England went down 16-15 but were far more polished. Eddie Jones has never been happier in defeat and we found out why at the World Cup semi-final 12 months later. Indeed, he recently recalled how in that defeat “we learned more about them than they learned about us”.
