And just when you thought it was safe to come out from behind the sofa. Steve Borthwick’s England had the misfortune to finally run into a team in some sort of form in Lille on Saturday, and the hard-won gains they had made over the course of the tournament seemed to slip right back away from them again.
All of a sudden, they looked like the same dull and lumpen lot who went down to Fiji in a warm-up game before the tournament. Samoa almost made it a double. They had never got within eight points of beating England before, but it took a 73rd-minute try to stop them winning this time.
England were abject, and of course, the thousands of French men and women in the stadium enjoyed it enormously. They adopted the Samoans as their own and serenaded them throughout the game with cries of “Allez les Bleus”. It was a hell of a Test, unless you were supporting England.
The only good thing their supporters got out of it was the win, 18-17. And Borthwick, of course, may well say that’s all that matters. He was full of praise for the character of the side, and said they had found “a way to win”, but only, in truth, because they damn near found a way to lose to them first.
The lowest of the many low moments came in the 65th minute, when England were trailing by six. Owen Farrell, their captain, settled himself over a penalty shot at goal, 15m away on the angle. Close your eyes and you can likely picture it, three steps back and three steps across, he leaned forward and back again, forward and back again, forward and back again, stopped, hitched his shorts, hunched his shoulders, stared at the posts, stared at the ball, stared at the posts, stared at the ball, then stopped, started forward, step step, step... and the whistle went.
Because while Farrell has been waiting, meditating, tick tock, the big red shot clock in the corner had run down to zero. The Samoans came charging forward off the tryline shouting and leaping like a bunch of kids fleeing the classroom after the last school bell of the summer term, while Farrell stared dumbly back at them then turned to check with the referee, Andrew Brace. It would have been a bad error for a rookie, never mind a man who had, minutes earlier, kicked his 1,180th point for England, and overtaken Jonny Wilkinson to become their all-time record scorer.
His teammates presented him with a framed photo afterwards, but, judging by the look on his face when he mentioned it, it will be a bittersweet memory, soured by the way he and the team played in this game. “I didn’t see the clock, and I got lost a little bit in the kick,” Farrell said afterwards. “That’s not good enough. I’m glad for the team’s sake it didn’t cost us.”
Just to add to the moment, England conceded a penalty at the ensuing scrum. It was that sort of match, when error followed error, each magnifying the effect of the last. When Samoa scored their second try, England were behind for the first time in almost four hours of rugby at this World Cup.
Farrell pulled them into a huddle and gave them short sharp orders for how they were going to back into the match. Moments later. England had the throw at a lineout outside the Samoan 22, they were planning to maul forwards, but Ben Earl butchered it by conceding a needless penalty.
Samoa worked the ball across the far side of the pitch, where England won a turnover. Alex Mitchell hoisted a miserable box kick that drifted back down to ground like a firework that had failed to ignite. The ball was bundled forward, and Duncan Paia’aua ran it down before anyone else reacted and scored in the corner. Or he would have done, if the referee hadn’t called him back for a knock-on in the run-up. It was an abysmal stretch of play, the worst England have put in since the tournament started. Given how painstakingly meticulous Borthwick can be, the Monday debrief could run into midweek.
He will get a long way down the list of what went wrong before he gets to Farrell’s performance. He might start with the fact that most of these players, rested from the game against Chile a fortnight ago, were playing in their first Test for three weeks. Which mostly showed in their defence. It has been watertight all tournament but against Samoa it had the vigour and urgency of a couple of parents who have just spent the week escorting their children around Disneyland Paris. Which is, of course, exactly what the fathers in his squad have been doing.
He might turn, too, to the desperate predictability of England’s gameplan. Hard as this England hit, Samoa knew exactly what they were going to throw at them, and saw every punch coming.
“We never felt too threatened on our line, even though England were throwing everything at us,” Samoa’s coach, Seilala Mapusua, said. It is, after all, not too hard to stay one step ahead of a team whose idea of an attacking variation is to throw a couple of extra men into their next rolling maul.
But underneath it all is the uncomfortable truth is that England’s worst performance at this tournament coincided with Farrell starting alongside George Ford for the first time in more than two-and-a-half years. They were a hell of a lot better when Ford made way for Marcus Smith. But given how good England were in previous weeks, when Ford was leading the attack, without Farrell outside him, you have to wonder if Borthwick took the wrong one of his three playmakers off.
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