Rarely have Ireland and England approached the final day of a Six Nations championship with such wildly contrasting expectations. For Irish rugby these are truly the best of times. For their white-shirted cousins another winter of despair is playing out. It is hard not to see it as a cautionary Dickensian tale of two unions, reaping the results of their respective eras of wisdom and foolishness.
And if Ireland do complete a grand slam at the Aviva Stadium and reinforce their status as the game’s No 1 international side less than six months before the Rugby World Cup, comparisons with England’s current predicament will be all the more glaring. A huge occasion looms but Ireland, in reality, have long since galloped away over the horizon in terms of their developmental pathways and administrative vision.
How has it come to this? Last week England were humiliated - there is no other word for it - 53-10 at home by France. And yet when a similarly well-stocked French side went to Dublin last month, they lost 32-19. Talking in recent days to numerous current and former international players and coaches, none envisage anything other than another sobering English defeat. “I fear for them this weekend,” murmured one knowledgeable insider. He is not alone in his view.
Clearly England have no divine right to success. It is also a mere 28 months since they were beating Ireland for the third time on the trot. But with the Irish now being steered ever upwards by Andy Farrell, part of England’s inner sanctum until 2015, with Mike Catt, Stuart Lancaster and Graham Rowntree also filling influential roles across the Irish Sea, it grows ever harder to applaud the strategic brilliance of the Rugby Football Union’s policy shapers.
Under Lancaster, for comparison’s sake, England lost just once apiece in the Six Nations to Ireland and France between 2012 and 2015. Their abrupt pool-stage exit at the 2015 Rugby World Cup subsequently overtook all else but, behind the scenes, England’s Under-20 teams were seriously competitive and delivered a core of talented young players to Eddie Jones, Lancaster’s successor.
Lancaster, who has since helped Leinster become the most consistently high-achieving provincial side in Europe, is uniquely well-placed to pinpoint how and why the English game has subsequently faltered. “It is frustrating when you’re watching from the outside,” he told The Guardian this week. “I felt the route we were going down between 2011 and 2015 was the right one in terms of the integration of club and country relationships and the alignment of the national programmes within the union. I still feel that sense of: ‘We’re all in it together’ – for the clubs to be successful in Europe and for England to be successful – is the right strategy.”
In Ireland, with only four provincial sides, around 130 professional players, central contracts and a high-quality schools conveyor belt, he has found far greater cohesion. “Ireland isn’t necessarily born with more talent but I do think they create more talent within their system at the moment. It’s definitely an advantage to have central contracting and a model where club and province are working together. If you compare that to England, you’re picking from 11 Premiership clubs, with lots of changes in coaching teams and a lack of joined-up thinking between club and country. It makes it challenging.”
Another of Lancaster’s pertinent observations is that England have allowed an immense amount of in-depth knowledge to walk out of the Twickenham door and pep up their rivals. Farrell, Shaun Edwards in France and now Jones back in Australia are prime examples with Lancaster also now set to take over at Racing 92 in Paris where his role will be to improve further French international players like Gaël Fickou, Cameron Woki and Nolann Le Garrec.
“There’s a lot of knowledge of systems and structures that indirectly helps the country you go to,” says Lancaster. “Or directly in Andy’s case.” Other nations appear more clued up to this future danger. “New Zealand do their very best to retain intellectual property. When I approached Wayne Smith about coming to join England in 2012, New Zealand Rugby got wind of it and said, ‘No way’. They didn’t want him to pass on what he’d learned in New Zealand.”
For those who were involved within English rugby two decades ago, when Clive Woodward was building towards 2003 World Cup glory, there is no time to waste if the RFU wishes to turn the prevailing tide. Simon Halliday, the ex-England centre and former chairman of European Professional Club Rugby, has also seen close up how Ireland have bounced back since 2015-16, when none of their provincial sides reached the last eight of the Champions’ Cup. “I think it was Leinster’s Mick Dawson who fixed a beady eye on me and said, ‘I wouldn’t worry about us, Simon. And here’s why,’” recalls Halliday. “They talked about their structure and how it was building. You could tell they had things absolutely sorted out.”
Not so in England just now, clearly. The charge list is lengthy: narrowing the talent pathway too early, not prioritising player development between the ages of 18 and 22, allowing some club academies to prioritise their needs above those of the individual or the national interest. “People closer to the game than me are saying it’s going to take us years to get back,” says Halliday. “I’m afraid we’ve wasted a number of years by denying what the reality was. And now we are where we are. It’s going to take some pretty hard yards and some pretty tough calls.
“The structures within the RFU are all wrong. They have to review them and get it fixed. If we don’t front up and say we need to restructure now I don’t see how anything changes. There’s no point sugar-coating it and I think [RFU chief executive] Bill Sweeney knows these are major turning points. They could start by separating the professional game from the amateur game. That is the key. If you don’t do that in England you’ve just got a muddle of leadership. There are some rather nasty precedents in English football. If you get it wrong you spend many years in the wilderness. You fall behind because your structures or priorities are wrong.”
With Ireland Under-20s also pursuing a grand slam this weekend, again at England’s potential expense in Cork on Sunday, it may yet be that things get even worse before they get better. “If you said to me how do Ireland look between 2023 and 2027, I’d say they look as strong as they are now,” stresses Lancaster. “As France will be.”
So even if England save some face inside the Aviva, in short, the outlook is deeply problematic. In the areas of attacking detail, mindset, comparative skills and coaching inspiration, there is only one grand slam-chasing thoroughbred in this weekend’s race. Coincidentally it is also the 50th anniversary of John Pullin’s immortal post-match line – “We may not be very good, but at least we turn up” – after his England side, unlike Scotland and Wales the previous year, travelled to Ireland in 1973 at the height of the Troubles. Much the same, in a pure rugby context, is relatively true now.
