Will Greenwood

Coach must solve big problems to keep title bid alive

The problems No urgency

England lacked intensity against Scotland. The simple definition of this is “Who wants the ball more?” The more you win, the more you focus on intricate detail and adding to your game. What is often lost is the primeval edge you need to win Test matches.

England have tried to remove the emotion, which makes sense when you are winning. Be clinical, be accurate, be precise. But it is very difficult to keep producing brutal hits and breakdown work, week in, week out. Sometimes a team are just a yard off. There is little technical cure. It must come from within.

In Paris this evening, I suspect you will see the sort of physicality we have been used to from England on a more regular basis. This will be fine if England deliver – as the best teams do – but if they falter again, people will start to get worried.

Broken breakdown

There were so many factors behind this area going so badly wrong at Murrayfield two weeks ago.

The line-out maul was disarmed, so England were not launching strikes on the front foot. There was a lack of ball handlers in the pack. Mako Vunipola, Joe Launchbury and Nathan Hughes are England’s best, but Hughes was coming back from injury and hardly used his hands at all, and was just keen to charge.

It severely limited England’s ability to move the ball in the contact area, and when that happens defenders find it much easier to zero in on ruck areas and beat the attacking side’s support runners to the punch.

There is no simple fix, and England need to understand that multiple failings contributed to the breakdown mistakes which left them on the back foot.

England also failed to react quickly enough to Scotland stacking the breakdown with players. By contrast, England

under-resourced the rucks. Time and again the two-man attack team from Scotland were in and on the ball against the one-man English ruck patrol.

Danny Care was often closest to the ball and he is not going to win many breakdown battles. But even if he were to do so, England would then be without a scrum-half.

Should this happen again, England must tighten up on the calls, not go narrow, but be 100 per cent accurate about job specifics in the contact area. Defensive spacing When the opposition are finding quick ball and the scrum-half is moving it away at pace, the defenders’ eyes will be seeing different things at different times.

All the players will be scanning for dangers but, because they are reacting and seeing things at different moments, they react at different times and in different ways.

They go to mark other areas, they become disconnected, and that is when a team are vulnerable. Look at England’s try errors against Scotland. For the second score, there were five or six errors in a 15-second period. England players were flying off in different directions, making individual decisions. It has not happened very often in the Eddie Jones era, but that does not mean it will never happen.

For the Huw Jones wonder try (below left), if you watch it in slow motion, you might say that England’s spacing was a yard out.

But the biggest issue was that Owen Farrell and Hughes were watching the breakdown again. The dogfight England were losing attracted the most important muscles in the players’ bodies – their eyes. Once that happens it is game over.

Spacing matters, but England’s biggest problem two weeks ago at Murrayfield was the speed of ball that Scotland generated at the breakdown. England are excellent defenders but every team on the planet is vulnerable to quick ball.

England have been winning but have they lost the primeval edge you need?

This attracts the attention of Nathan Hughes and Owen Farrell, who have allowed space to open up between them. Scotland are once again outgunning England at the breakdown. They take their eyes off the lurking Huw Jones, who duly capitalises on...

Scotland’s defence largely stands off, apart from Jonny Gray, who sacks Joe Launchbury to slow their progress. England are attempting to set up a rolling maul at a line-out on halfway, to try and gain either yards or win a cheap penalty. Grant...