Richard Bath looks at some of the latest goings on in Northern Hemisphere rugby.
WITH THE November internationals having finished and the Six Nations almost upon us, the focus of the Englandobsessed media in this part of the world is changing to 2019 and the World Cup.
After the travails of 2018, the question of whether England are genuinely credible challengers for the World Cup is coming into sharp relief.
For all but the most Moonie-like cheerleaders in the England press corps, the answer is a depressing one: unless England undergo a radical change in fortunes, the men in white are destined to fall short in Japan.
The mood music around England is not good, and that has much to do with Eddie Jones’ prickly personality.
When England were winning 24 out of their first 25 games under the Aussie, he could do no wrong. It did not matter that England were not playing particularly well, or that Jones didn’t seem to know his best side. All that mattered was that England were winning.
Since then there has been a gradual but seemingly irrevocable slide in relations to a point of simmering antagonism.
A press pack which used to lap up Jones’ acidic asides now bridles at being patronised. The constant tinkering that was seen as fine-tuning a highperformance vehicle, is now viewed as the cause of mechanical failure. When success followed success, Jones could discard the maverick talent that is Danny Cipriani and say “trust me”, and people would.
After a run of poor performances and even poorer results, Jones no longer inspires the blind loyalty he once enjoyed. The suspicion that the Emperor has lost his clothes has begun to take hold.
As Jones is now finding out, one of the great problems with English rugby is the lack of perspective.
When England were winning matches no-one cared that it was by small margins and that they seemed to continually get the run of the green; they were still lauded as world-beaters when all they needed was for the wind to change direction and they would lose as many games as they won. That has duly happened. And now, after having lost six of their last nine games – and in one of those wins found themselves trailing at half-time at Twickenham to Japan, while they needed a dodgy TMO decision to shade the Springboks at HQ – their deficiencies are being endlessly picked apart.
Somehow, the glass has gone from being half full to half empty. There is no leeway for the fact that two of their three Six Nations losses (at Murrayfield and in Paris) were against sides that are improving fast under new coaches, or that when they lost decisively at Twickenham to Ireland, they were defeated by a side that is simply better than them.
There was no willingness to concede that the South Africa side which England played in the summer had been transformed by Rassie Erasmus, as they showed by winning in Wellington.
There are, to be fair, plenty of reasons for England fans to be down. After more than three years in post Jones still doesn’t seem to be anywhere near a settled side, and England are still comfortably behind both New Zealand and Ireland.
There also seems to have been a never-ending roll-call of injuries to key players, and with the business end of the Premiership and Champions Cup season still to come, more will follow.
And then there’s England’s away form: of their six games on the road this year, the only ones they have won are away in Rome and in a dead rubber in South Africa in a game where the now discarded Danny Cipriani was the main difference between the two sides.
And if England fans didn’t have enough reasons to be gloomy before their side played Japan, then they certainly did afterwards.
Having said beforehand that England were going to “physically smash” Japan, suggesting that the Brave Blossoms “go to the temple and pray” because England would be “absolutely ruthless”, England were duly utterly woeful.
Although they eventually ended up winning 35-15 after deservedly trailing 15-10 at half-time, they had to start emptying the bench after 32 minutes, bringing on genuine starters like Owen Farrell, Henry Slade and Sam Underhill to inject some life into the corpse.
Most worryingly of all, however, they missed 32 tackles and had just 37 per cent of possession. Against Japan.
So that’s the bad stuff, and everyone agrees that there’s plenty of it to go around. But, as ever with England and Jones, nothing is quite as good or bad as it seems, and if you take a step back there are also good reasons to be cautiously optimistic too when it comes to the World Cup.
The first is England’s draw. When the pools were announced, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in England at the fact that they had been drawn in the obligatory pool of death with two other big dogs in France and Argentina in a scenario that has all the makings of a re-run of their miserable campaign of 2015.
But the bigger picture is that if they can get through the pool, as their world rankings suggest they should do with something to spare, they will avoid both New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa until the semi-finals. Get that far and they’re in with a shout.
More to the point, the carnage of this year may actually help Jones. When his side kept winning it was difficult to make radical changes, and he stuck with several old-stagers – Mike Brown, Dan Cole, Chris Robshaw and George Ford all arguably come into this category – who were more dependable try-hards than incendiary talents at test level.
Instead, he has now been forced to change personnel, which in turn is beginning to change the way England are playing.
The back-row is a good case in point, especially as it’s where England’s limitations were first glaringly revealed against Scotland in the Six Nations.
At Murrayfield, Jones turned up with a one-paced and over-sized back-row made up of second row Courtney Lawes on the blindside, unfit Nathan Hughes at No 8, and blindside Chris Robshaw on the openside.
Against a Scottish back-row trio that included a streetwise blindside in John Barclay and a genuine openside in Hamish Watson, England comprehensively lost the battle of the breakdown and, with it, the game. The famously stubborn Jones persisted with exactly the same back-row in Paris the following week, only to endure exactly the same outcome.
Scotland and France, though, have done Jones a favour. Had he persisted with a behemoth back-row, it may have worked on the slow tracks of the Northern Hemisphere, but on the concrete-hard surfaces of Japan in September when the speed of the game will be raised a notch or three, he could forget it.
Humbled in Edinburgh and Paris, he has had to change. In South Africa he played teenage flier Tom Curry on the openside and the youngster was a revelation.
With Curry injured, he played another genuine openside, 22-year-old Sam Underhill, against New Zealand and he was the man of the match. It is late in the day, but England now have two genuine opensides, with Underhill also able to play blindside if England want to ramp up the tempo, which is when they are at their best.
Ditto at No 8 where Billy Vunipola is a force of nature but injured far too often. Mark Wilson may play at unfashionable Newcastle, so it’s taken him a while to be called up, but he was mobile and shrewd against the All Blacks, and is now a decent understudy for big Billy.
It’s the same all over the pitch in key areas. By ditching Cole at tighthead, Jones has opened the way for Kyle Sinkler, who brings the sort of mobility, tackling and ball-carrying stats which Cole could only dream of. Instantly England’s pack has an injection of dynamism and another weapon in place of Cole, who is a solid scrummager but offers little around the park.
And on it goes. At stand-off the carnage of 2018 – and specifically the car-crash first half against Japan - seems to have finally convinced Jones that his best option is to play his best player, Owen Farrell, in his most natural position.
Against France and Argentina in the World Cup, England are likely to be drawn into an arm-wrestle where game management and sheer guts will determine who prevails; if so, that’s where Farrell comes into his own.
Now Jones has one major hurdle to overcome. As he proved with the Brumbies, the Aussie is the ultimate pragmatist, and in many ways his safety-first approach and default position of relying on sheer muscle to overwhelm opponents fits in well with the English psyche.
Yet that conservativism won’t win the World Cup, and in any case the lesson of the past year is that England are at their best when they are on the front foot and playing with tempo and ambition.
As they showed against New Zealand in patches, they have the weapons behind the scrum to play a more expansive and entertaining brand of rugby, and when Jones feels he has no choice – such as when he was Japan coach – the England coach can produce sides playing remarkably effective running rugby.
Through defeat, and almost by default, Jones is beginning to fashion a more mobile, ambitious team that may just be able to launch a realistic challenge for the World Cup.
Now his challenge is to change his own mindset and get his side to play a brand of rugby that will allow them to make good on that promise.