They say a man ought to know his limitations, and England discovered theirs at the Stade de France on Saturday night. They are somewhere right out on the furthest edge of contention, as close as you can go without actually making it. They were, in their own tenacious way, utterly brilliant, cunning, courageous, and committed, but those qualities only get you so far when you’re up against a team as good as these Springboks, who have just as much of all of them, and more of everything else besides. “Never wrestle with a pig,” said George Bernard Shaw, “you both get dirty, and besides the pig likes it”. Well, now Steve Borthwick knows you never try to grapple with a Springbok, either.
Some defeats cut deeper than others. This one, in the dying moments of a match that England led from the very first minute right through an hour and 17 minutes of brutal and excruciating rugby, will hurt more than most. England were oh so close to making the final. They used to measure the number of people watching big events on TV by the power surge on the National Grid when everyone got up to put their kettles on for a cup of tea at half-time. This time it might well have been by the spike in traffic on the travel and hotel websites as England fans watching back home picked up their phones and investigated the idea of getting out to Paris for the final.
Then South Africa won a scrum penalty, five metres inside England’s half. And well, you just knew what was coming. Of course Handré Pollard kicked it and now England were behind for the first time, one point off with three minutes left to play. They spent it trying to claw their way back within kicking distance, but South Africa just didn’t let them get there. They actually thumped them backwards with a series of vicious tackles, deeper in their own half, further away from where they needed to be. Having worked that hard to win a lead, they weren’t going to let it slip now.
In the end, the only thing that will ease the pain of it for the English players will be the knowledge that they played so well. Which won’t have been much consolation in the minutes, or even the next days, weeks, or months, afterwards, but one day, surely, they will look back on this match with a measure of pride. England, a team who were written off after being beaten at home by Fiji in the warm-ups before the tournament, ended up pushing the world champions closer than anyone expected. Yes, they missed their opportunity to make the final, but the truth is it was something of a miracle that they had earned it to begin with.
It had, after all, been two years since they had beaten a top-five team, and right now South Africa are No 1, top of the rankings, and world champions for another week at least. They have spent the four years developing a new style of play, based around their richly gifted fly-half Manie Libbok. England, on the other had spent the last four months paring theirs right back. The days of pairing two playmakers at fly-half and inside-centre, all the complicated designs they were working on in the autumn, were long gone. England arrived here, instead, with a gameplan that was so devolved it was barely recognisable as modern rugby at all. It largely involved kicking the ball as often as possible – they did it 41 times in this semi-final – chasing after it and then, if they didn’t win it back, working their socks off in defence.
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South Africa ended up chasing after opponents who just wouldn’t be drawn away from their own way of doing things. Kick the ball, contest the kick, and, if you can’t get there, smash the man underneath it down. “My style?” Bruce Lee says in Enter the Dragon. “You can call it the art of fighting without fighting”. England are mastering the art of playing without playing. It takes some nerve. There was a point when Jesse Kriel grabbed Manu Tuilagi by the shirt and tried to start on him. Tuilagi simply grinned back at him. Elliot Daly ran over to the two of them to intervene, and Kriel simply collared him as well and stood there for a moment, one England player in each hand, and neither making a move back at him.
They were brilliantly composed, as if they had taken on the character of their new coach. Their captain, Owen Farrell, was the only one who lost his head, which he will regret since the referee, Ben O’Keeffe, penalised him for it with a 10m penalty, which meant Libbok was within easy kicking distance.
The abiding image, though, will be of England forming up another of their ponderous caterpillar rucks, one body joining on behind another in one long human centipede, while Alex Mitchell, the ball by his feet, crabbed backwards like a man retreating from a rattlesnake, then whistling up another box kick. That and their work at the breakdown and maul, Farrell’s brilliant drop goal, and their utter devastation when the final whistle went.
They had played South Africa five times in the World Cup before taking them on here, and only scored one try in all that time. They didn’t even really seem to go after one, this time thinking, instead, they could kick their way ahead and stay there. And they almost did. But almost, of course, doesn’t count for much in the World Cup.
