Summer schedule hands coach the chance to start transition to World Cup
With his Lions players away, Eddie Jones can use the US and Canada fixtures to test run the next generation ahead of cull
Bill Sweeney makes no bones about it. “This is a critical tour,” the Rugby Football Union chief executive says of England’s summer fixtures against the United States and Canada.
Notwithstanding the rather significant issue that the dates and locations have yet to be confirmed – at present the matches are most likely to take place in England because of Covid-19 travel restrictions in North America – this will be Eddie Jones’s first opportunity to put his transition plans into place heading towards the 2023 World Cup. “If we are in this period of evolution, we have to make sure it’s forward-moving evolution,” said Sweeney, who is assessing Jones’s future. “Traditionally, that [tour] is an opportunity to test out players and experiment in other ways.”
Even if Jones’s recent selections have seemed relatively static, he is adamant that there is a plan for a changing of the guard, with a minimum of 30 per cent of the present squad likely to be culled before the next World Cup. Thus far, the head coach has been restricted by his (some would say stubborn) loyalty to his key lieutenants and the machinations of the RFU’S agreement with Premiership Rugby.
However, all such limitations should disappear in July when England’s Lions contingent disappear, even if Jones’s original estimate of 20 of his players going to South Africa may need to be halved. The glass ceiling that appears to be checking the progress of Marcus Smith and Alex Dombrandt and stopping the unleashing of Alfie Barbeary and Freddie Steward should be removed.
Of particular importance is the succession planning at half-back, where only a handful of players have started under Jones aside from Ben Youngs, George Ford and Owen Farrell. On the Inside Line podcast, Jones confirmed that he intended to rest senior players not selected by the Lions to allow a new half-back combination to emerge.
“There are some good young guys, particularly in the nines and 10s, and it’s the hardest area to adapt to Test rugby,” Jones said. “There are some young 10s like Marcus Smith, Finn Smith, [Joe] Simmonds at Exeter. They are all possibly going to have the opportunity to step up to the plate.”
Jones’s planning extends to the 2027 World Cup in collaboration with Conor O’shea, the RFU’S director of performance rugby. “Eddie sent me a text about some of the players for 2023 and 2027 and said which camps do they fit into,” O’shea said. “You hate namechecking players, but they’ve been namechecked – I saw an article in The Telegraph. You see [Jack] Van Poortvliet and Raffi Quirke as two nines. You look at Will Joseph, Tommy Freeman, so they’re 18 or 19 and are they 2023 or are they 2027?”
To understand the importance of this summer, you only need to look back four years ago to the tour of Argentina when both Sam Underhill and Tom Curry made their debuts during another Lions year. Curry believes that experience turbocharged his trajectory. “I came back fitter and heavier,” he said. “Then mentally understanding how much there is left to improve and how much growth you can get. Where I needed to be, I wasn’t at the time.”
Four other uncapped players on that tour – Mark Wilson, Jack Singleton, Joe Cokanasiga and Piers Francis – would go on to be included in the 2019 World Cup squad. The experience of Curry’s twin, Ben, who went on that tour but remains uncapped, shows that a call-up alone will not automatically bring you into Jones’s good books.
‘Traditionally, it is an opportunity to test out players and experiment in other ways’
It is just as revealing to look back on England’s squad for the 2017 Six Nations. Of the original 35 players, which was missing Chris Robshaw and the Vunipola brothers, 16 (including all the back-rowers) did not make it to the 2019 World Cup.
Even taking the team that played the final match of that year’s tournament, the 13-9 defeat by Ireland, seven of the 23 – Mike Brown, Dylan Hartley, James Haskell, Danny Care, Ben Te’o, Tom Wood and Nathan Hughes – did not go to Japan. With the exception of Hughes, these were all England’s oldest players.
Going by that measure, the current thirtysomething brigade of Youngs, Wilson, Mako Vunipola and Jonny May would be vulnerable.
However, Jones has made clear that hunger rather than age will determine who stays on to 2023. “That’s what I’m trying to assess now: which players can keep growing, which players can be hungry to be the best player in the world at the World Cup and win the World Cup,” he said.