Training drills equip new-born side to pull off a heroic victory

Jones’ maturing players can knuckle down when the odds go against them, writes Simon Briggs

England’s afternoon started abysmally and finished in triumph. So much so that you half-wondered whether Eddie Jones, the arch string-puller at the heart of this reborn side, had contrived the whole scenario as a dastardly training exercise.

When Elliot Daly sleepwalked into a mid-air collision, and got himself a red card, it felt like a sadistic way of sorting the men from the boys. How long can you lot handle Argentina, one of the most fluent teams ever to visit Twickenham, with a one-player deficit? There were six minutes gone when Daly made his howler, and no fewer than 82 still to play, as Argentina stretched out that lung-bursting first half with a series of attacking scrums under the posts.

To add to the sense of an adverse camber, circumstances threw in another road hump just before the break. Billy Vunipola, whose presence is not only talismanic but totemic to boot, collapsed in such a way that one immediately feared a season-ending injury. (Vunipola is not one to cry wolf.) He tried to resist the inevitable but still had to be driven off on a motorised stretcher. One low-slung dump-truck meeting another.

In Vunipola’s place, Teimana Harrison looked almost comically choirboyish and undersized. This is not meant as criticism of Harrison, who put in some solid hits of his own. It is just that Vunipola is the most fearsome rugby player on the planet right now. All Black supremacists will cavil about Kieran Read’s prowess in the wide channels. But who would you rather have running at you?

How satisfying, then, to see England absorb their adversity and convert it into achievement. In the first half, their defence was like an octopus with seven arms: slightly disadvantaged but still extremely clingy. They pushed up with such speed, purpose and precision that Argentine midfielders kept looking outside and seeing nothing but waves of dark blue, closing in around them.

The penalty try resulted from one example of this suffocating pressure. With no obvious passing option open, Santiago González Iglesias attempted a chip through the defensive line. But the ball rebounded off Dylan Hartley’s shin, and Chris Robshaw, the patron saint of lost causes, was suddenly

charging through in pursuit. Robshaw – the man Jones once claimed was “not hard over the ball and not quick” – was on hand when Owen Farrell stripped possession from the retreating Juan Martín Hernández and then doubled up as an oversized scrum-half. His pass to Tom Wood would have been perfectly weighted had Matías Orlando not interposed a hand.

So far so good, but wouldn’t Argentina use half-time to come up with a master plan? They had already battered away at England’s ranks with the longest 40 minutes of rugby imaginable. There were some hollow eyes and heaving chests as Jones’s men trooped off at half-time. Suddenly that £22,000 match fee, which generated such a talking point against Fiji last week, seemed almost derisory. And when Santiago Cordero touched down for a length-of-the-field try, on the first phase after the interval, England’s ascendancy had apparently gone in 60 seconds. But we underestimated this fast-maturing side.

Whatever fitness drills Jones is putting his cohorts through, they should probably be rolled out on the NHS. The likes of Courtney Lawes and George Kruis kept rumbling for the whole hyper-extended match, two hours of hitting rucks and hauling down runners, clearly outlasting an Argentine team who are carrying the scars of a maiden Rugby Championship. “If you look at the 65minute mark,” said Jones afterwards, “one team was fatiguing and the other team wasn’t.”

The Argentine expressions, as Jonny May crossed for England’s second try, were grim. Throwing away this unique opportunity – for no Englishman had received a red card for more than a decade – was a punch in the guts. Hernández expressed his despair through arguably the worst restart kick ever seen here, which somehow managed to travel backwards into Argentina’s own half.

But if the visitors were hurting, Jones was in clover. We heard none of his sly potshots at his own men. Instead he commended his senior staff for “exceptional” communication. He loved the way they amended the game plan on the hoof, from ball-in-hand to ball-on-boot. Jones only cut up rough once, when asked how Daly would respond to his sending-off. “It was an error of judgment,” Jones insisted. “I’ve said no more than five words to him.” One could almost imagine those five words containing a hint of congratulation. A blow-out against a weary Argentina would have been neither here nor there. But the conversion of an early cock-up into a heroic, backs-to-the-wall victory? Now that’s an afternoon to crow about.