Make your mind up time on Farrell and Ford, Eddie
OWEN Farrell’s place in the England team has been sacrosanct during Eddie Jones’ tenure as coach. However, the showdown with Wales on Saturday could change that, with England on the cliff-edge of a mediocre Six Nations campaign if they cannot get over the line in Cardiff.
The reliance on Farrell has been accentuated by Jones’ decision to make him captain after calling time on Dylan Hartley’s international career leading into the 2019 World Cup.
Now Jones is at another crossroads, not just in terms of captaincy, but also in terms of a yo-yo selection strategy at fly-half featuring Farrell and George Ford, which is in danger of unravelling two years out from the 2023 World Cup.
Whether this has become an overreliance due to Jones’ reluctance to drop any of his tried-and-tested key players when they lose form, has now become the burning issue – not least because this week, Jones acknowledged his captain is “not at his best”.
Even a cursory glance at Farrell’s form over the last three months shows that he is not firing, with his defence a particular concern, whether at flyhalf or inside centre.
Against France in the Autumn Nations Cup final in December he was left in the starting blocks as Matthieu Jalibert breezed past him to set up Brice Dulin’s try. Then, in the Calcutta Cup defeat a fortnight ago, he was frequently in no man’s land in defence, highlighted when his token stand-tall tackle was brushed aside as Duhan van der Merwe scored Scotland’s try.
An underlying factor in Farrell’s discomfort is that the urgent requirement for him to change from a high, rising shoulder Rugby League-style challenge to a failsafe lower tackling technique – or risk becoming a serial red-card liability – is not proving to be an easy transition.
Farrell’s hard-wired tendency to go high was underlined when his wraptackle on Italy’s young scrum-half, Stephen Varney, at Twickenham last weekend ended in a head clash which was deemed to be accidental. However, until he starts tackling lower as his default position, the England captain will put his side in jeopardy.
One of the biggest selection questions facing Jones as he attempts to solve England’s midfield riddle, is that if Ford is his starting fly-half, is Farrell a good enough inside centre at Test level to carry England to World Cup title in two years’ time? At the moment, the answer is no.
A comparison with France’s Gael Fickou tells us why. Fickou’s all-round abilities as a running-handling threat at 12 are much more pronounced than Farrell’s, as is the effectiveness of his tackling, leading to his appointment by Shaun Edwards as the leader of the French defence.
While Farrell may have a more varied kicking game than the French 12, he does not have the pace or dynamic line-breaking capacity of Fickou, or for that matter, Ireland’s Robbie Henshaw. How the English captain compares with whoever plays from a trio of inside centres available to Wales this weekend – Jonny Williams, Nick Tompkins and Owen
Watkin – could also be seminal to his international future.
The conundrum of playing Ford and Farrell together in the same midfield might have had Jones scratching his head for much of the last five years, but it is nothing new. It stretches back to them playing together for the England U20s as a 1012 partnership in the 2011 Junior World Championship, when England were losing finalists against New Zealand.
At the time Ford was much more of a darting, running 10 then he is now. A decade later the problem that Jones has with playing either Farrell or Ford at fly-half, or in tandem at 10-12, is that neither of them threatens the defence in the way that new generation fly-halves like Exeter’s Joe Simmonds, Harlequins’ Marcus Smith, or the Bristol/Saracens utility Max Malins do.
Another significant factor in assessing Farrell’s England record at fly-half is that most of his highlights in the 10 shirt have come when playing for Saracens. Farrell started at inside centre in every game of the 2016 Grand Slam, two of the three Tests in the tour whitewash of Australia the same year, as well as in the 2019 World Cup semi-final victory over New Zealand.
Which brings us to the impact that Saracens’ demise has had on Farrell.
Jones said this week that he found the reasons for Farrell’s drop-off in form hard to explain, but I believe they are in plain sight. Farrell is not game ready. He played just five matches in the four and a half months between his five-week ban for a stiff-arm tackle on Wasps fly-half Charlie Atkinson and the start of the 2021 Six Nations.
It is due to Saracens not playing a single league match in the mothballed Championship, whereas there have been ten rounds of Premiership action. This has also coincided with the retirement of Brad Barritt, the captain, inside centre, and all-important driver in a Saracens side which, with Farrell at fly-half, won three European Cups and five Premiership titles.
Even though Farrell is 29, and has 90 England caps, he will have felt the loss of a bulwark like Barritt. The question is, can Farrell reassert his credentials again as an international fly-half, or reinvent himself as a more dynamic inside centre?
The first means deposing Ford, and the second means turbo-charging their existing 10-12 partnership – which was not good enough to win the World Cup in 2019, and currently looks unlikely to provide a different outcome in 2023.
Lose to Wales and it could be a watershed which Jones uses to promote new wave 10s like Simmonds and Smith, while easing the hold the Farrell-Ford combo has on the tactical tiller. But given its sacrosanct status, don’t bank on it.