Talismanic brothers hold key but need to be battle-hardened

Billy and Mako Vunipola are irreplaceable but England should not be tempted to protect them

England can probably survive without Owen Farrell at fly-half, even though they would have to change their style. You could even argue that when the England pack are going forward that George Ford is, in fact, better than Farrell, with the opposite being true when the packs cannot be separated. But England will definitely struggle in Japan if they were to lose either of the Vunipola brothers.

The temptation, of course, is to wrap these players up in cotton wool, but they need to be battlehardened, which Billy Vunipola has come out and said this week ahead of making his fourth start in the warm-up Tests. Obviously you do not need him to play against the weaker sides in England’s group, Tonga and the US. No disrespect to those teams, but I do not see the point. Imagine him tearing a hamstring in the first game.

Mako has been battling injuries anyway since the Premiership final and in the past they have both had time out of the game. The best-case scenario is that neither of them sees any action until the latter two group games. All sides have a talisman but if you want to be the world champions, then you have to be good enough to win it without that talisman, which Billy certainly is for England.

We have noticed from past World Cups that players are right at their physical peak just before the start of the tournament. From the first game, most of them then start to tail off. Look at Manu Tuilagi in the Six Nations against Ireland, probably the fittest he has been for a long time heading into the game. As a result he turned in a maximised performance.

Once the games start, that pre-season mentality drops off and you start moving into game mode, training for the week. Your overall fitness and power slide slightly. Resting the Vunipolas and possibly Farrell until the final two group games then leaves them with potentially five games on the trot to win the World Cup, which is effectively similar to a Six Nations campaign.

With Billy, I am honestly not sure how you replace him. You would lose that power off the base of the scrum and around the ruck. Let’s not wrap him up in cotton wool, though.

Sir Clive Woodward had a dream ahead of the 1999 World Cup quarter-final defeat by South Africa that Jonny Wilkinson was going to get injured, so he brought him off the bench instead. Sometimes when you try to protect someone too much, you end up losing them anyway and it devalues the team. The message you want to send is that the squad are so strong you can afford to lose anyone.

Aside from the Vunipolas, the other area to worry about is scrum-half, with only two going to Japan in Ben Youngs and Willi Heinz. What happens if one of them gets a three-week injury like a dead leg – do they stick with them in the squad and hope the other specialist can play as much as possible with Ford as cover? I would absolutely have taken three scrum-halves, losing a back-row forward in the process, given that both Maro Itoje and Courtney Lawes are capable of playing very well at blindside flanker.

In terms of tomorrow night’s game, the only players who will really want to be pulling on that white shirt are the ones trying to force their way into the team. If I was one of the others named in the starting XV, right about now I would be finding someone to snog who had the flu.

It will be a special night though for Ruaridh Mcconnochie. He has had a difficult start, but the amount of confidence Eddie Jones has shown in him has been unbelievable. Now, fingers crossed, he gets the chance to prove himself in an England shirt. Generous Telegraph subscribers raised £13,000 for Doddie Weir’s ‘My Name’5 Doddie Foundation’ at a star-studded event at Twickenham on Tuesday. Sir Ian Mcgeechan, Will Greenwood, Brian Moore, Danny Cipriani, Austin Healey, Maggie Alphonsi and Weir all spoke at the World Cup Live event and five signed England shirts were auctioned off for Weir’s charity, which fights Motor Neurone Disease.