Resurgent England are making a case to be regarded as nation’s all-time best
Wales are a long way short of being the greatest team to have worn the red jersey, as Eddie Jones puts it in a deflection tactic designed to take the spotlight away from his side, who are making a case for being regarded as their own country’s all-time best.
Of course, England have yet to win a World Cup, as Martin Johnson’s gang of high achievers did in 2003. And we are only two matches into the Six Nations, a tournament in which England were about to hit skid row 12 months ago after also winning their first two games, in Italy (46-15) and at home to Wales (12-6).
Yet this is different. Something is stirring with England. France may well have been a poor imitation of the team they used to be, hapless and woefully out of step with the modern game. England exposed all those frailties, in much the manner that many All Blacks sides have done and would do. Good teams win: great teams eviscerate.
If England were to prevail in Cardiff on Saturday week, then they would be well on their way to their second Grand Slam in four years under Jones. Italy and Scotland remain to be played at home and it would take a fool to wager against England, given that Italy have never registered a win, home or way, against them, while the last Scottish victory at Twickenham was back in 1983. It is not arrogance to speak of a putative England title, merely an appraisal of the fact file. Three titles in four years with two Slams would be a sign of serious class.
But only if Wales can be beaten. Jones invests every word he utters with the same attention to detail he pays to honing Jonny May’s pace or Owen Farrell’s kicking. Given that he shared a pre-tournament curry with Warren Gatland, for which the Welsh management picked up the tab, the seeming prickliness towards Gatland’s jibe that England slipped away during last year’s slump – poles apart, as the Wales head coach put it – is animated by sporting issues rather than any personal friction.
Jones is intent on steeling his own men for the trip to Cardiff at the same time as he seeks to undermine Wales’s elevated status by contrived flattery.
The Welsh victory over Italy was their 11th in succession and brought them level with the side of 19071910 that had Jack Bancroft, Jack Jones and Dicky Owen in their ranks. A win over England would make this generation statistically the most successful in Welsh history. But the greatest? Not a chance. The players themselves are all too aware of the feats of those who have gone before them, particularly the teams of the Seventies; of Gareth and Barry and Gerald and JPR and others who won six Five Nations titles (with two shares also), including three Slams.
Gatland’s team have many virtues but their success is relative to the opposition, as well as to the manufactured staging of games such as the one against the Springboks in Washington in June.
Yet stats are stats and the self-confidence that a winning run breeds should not be downplayed, as events at the Stade de France on the opening weekend proved, with Wales hauling themselves back from the brink – although we did not know quite as much about French ineptitude as we do now. But England have taken their own game to a different level in the past four months, largely through the step up they have made in their game management.
There are other factors, too, for instance the sharpness shown by the likes of Ben Youngs and Elliot Daly, both of whom are operating at a cut above their club form, which is testimony to how positive the England environment must be.
Any team who have won a World Cup have had a first-rate coaching unit and the way John Mitchell, as well as Scott Wisemantel, have been integrated over the past nine months shows that England now have an off-field brain trust that stands comparison with Ireland or Wales or New Zealand.
In 2003, Clive Woodward warned his team not to bother coming back over the Severn Bridge were they to lose in Cardiff. They duly obliged. Jones’s squad are approaching that same level where they, too, can be primed to head into hostile territory and play as they did in Dublin; without any fear, confident in their game.
The label of “The Greatest” can wait for another day. But, equally, it would be wrong to downplay the current level of England’s output.