Four fly-halves demanding Jones change
The England coach has not brought in a new No10 in his six years in charge – now is the time to start looking beyond Farrell and Ford
The fact that Eddie Jones has not blooded a single new fly-half in his six-year tenure as England head coach is on one hand quite surprising. Just the law of averages would suggest there would have been occasions when two of Owen Farrell, George Ford and Danny Cipriani would be missing simultaneously, forcing him to hand a debut to another specialist No10. On the other hand, it is not so surprising, as Ford and Farrell were 22 and 24 when Jones took over and he has built his team around them, handing the latter the captaincy after Dylan Hartley departed.
As I wrote last week, though, that double act will not go on forever (Cipriani has already played his final England game, barring an Eddie about-turn of gargantuan proportions). And there is a growing clamour to look at another system. Beauden Barrett, Richie Mo’unga, Romain Ntamack, Mathieu Jalibert, Finn Russell … running fly-halves are in vogue at the moment. I do not think England have to go down that route. This is not an attack on the current No 10s. They have been world-class before and have led England to great things. This is me looking at some of the kids playing in a position where Eddie has picked only three players; trying to read the runes and suggest who could/should be the next cab off the rank …
In my view, only four names are realistically in the frame. Of those, Joe Simmonds and Marcus Smith are at the front of the queue, with Wasps’ Jacob Umaga and Charlie Atkinson next in line. James
Grayson, at Northampton, and Gloucester’s George Barton are the only other two who spring to mind, but I think they are still a little way off.
For me, Piers Francis is a centre, George Furbank is better in the outside channels with his pace and arcing runs, and Max Malins is like an Elliot Daly 2.0 – great in the backfield, the outside channels and as a second receiver. But I am not clamouring to see him at fly-half.