Captain Corry men to rebuild calls on his the fortress

MARTIN Corry gave Australia and New Zealand due notice yesterday that England intend putting the Colditz factor back into Twickenham with immediate effect.

After watching the Wallabies find an escape route from HQ this time last year before the French found an even more embarrassing one three months later, England’s captain called upon his team to match their rediscovered ambition with the kind of home results their fans used to take almost for granted.

As a sign that England really mean business after dropping from first to sixth in the world rankings, Corry will settle for nothing less than a winning flourish guaranteed to rearrange the global pecking order.

Asked whether he would take two wins out of three against Au s t r a l i a t h i s Saturday, New Zealand the following week and Samoa the week after, Corry gave the question short shrift.

‘ Definitely not,’ he said. ‘We have to take a winning mentality into every game at Twickenham. We are all about winning and that’s what we have got to get back to. We are not going to settle for second best and say: “ Oh well, we’re on a learning curve”.

‘Believe me, the expectation within the camp is far greater than outside. Performance is important but I’ll take a 6- 3 win on Saturday.’

After an extended 10 days in camp free of all Premiership duties, England began winding down following training yesterday — giving their players a 48- hour break, satisfied that the hard work had been done.

Corry said: ‘ It’s about making sure we are fresh to play an international at our pace and to our standard and that doesn’t come from flogging yourself on the training ground. You have t o s t a y m e n t a l l y a n d physically alert, although I’m not sure my two-yearold daughter will let me stay in that condition!’

Corry agrees that England’s results post-World Cup, nine defeats in 16 matches, are unacceptable. The pain of experiencing the home setbacks against Ireland, Australia and France will drive him to ensure that a Wallaby team suffering from six consecutive defeats finds no refuge from a seventh.

‘ We have been knocked for how we played last season and rightly so,’ said Corry as England returned to their five- star retreat in Surrey after a week in the more spartan surrounds of Loughborough University. ‘ The last Au s t r a l i a g a m e w a s v e r y disappointing and the Six Nations was very poor by our standards.

‘ I t h u r t s l i k e h e l l t o l o s e anywhere, never mind at home. As a player, nothing hurts more than walking off the field knowing you have just lost a game you should have won. At least now we can do something to ease the pain a bit.

‘We have to get back to the attitude that when we play at Twickenham, we expect to win. We want to run out there expecting a victory and we want the supporters to feel the same expectation.

‘ With Australia, as we saw with the Ashes last summer, you always get a side which battles to the death and, hopefully, we can emulate our cricketers and win. New Zealand played exceptionally well against Wales. Are they beatable? Yes they are, but we can’t look that far ahead because if we take an eye off Australia, they will sting us.

‘I can sit here and say that things are improving but match day is the only time when it counts. We know how games should be won and what has to be done to get on the right side of victory, to make sure that when we do get in front we stay there and close the game out.’

The fact that England have lost six times within the last two years by a single score illustrates with painful clarity how they have lost a knack which, coincidence or not, has been on the wane since Martin Johnson’s Test retirement. An under- performing team pushing their luck in bizarre circumstances hardly made the defeats a surprise.

Throwing away a flood of line- out possession against Ireland in the 2004 Six Nations started the rot, running out of goalkickers in an extraordinary chain of events against Australia resulted in another defeat eight months later.

Missing a fusillade of penalties, as they did against France this spring, added up to a third home setback, eight days after a miserable lack of ambition in Cardiff had duly invited Gavin Henson to ensure England got what they deserved. T h e y h a d t h e i r u n l u c k y moments, too, most notably in Dublin with Mark Cueto’s disallowed try but Corry, forged in Dean Richards’ old foundry at Leicester, is pragmatic enough to realise that a team makes its own luck. He is also frank, almost brutally so,

when it comes to self- analysis of goals missed — like the Lions last summer.

Corry, acting captain for all but 45 seconds of the first Test in C h r i s t c h u r c h a f t e r B r i a n O’Driscoll’s spearing, was dropped for the next one the following week. ‘I said before the tour that I was really looking forward to going out there for the ultimate challenge,’ he said. ‘ You want to play your very best rugby on the big occasion. I can put my hand on my heart and say I didn’t.

‘ It was an experience — not a great one but often you can learn from negatives. I’m not sure how much it affected me or changed me but this is now an opportunity to put that right under a different banner.

‘ You never look over your shoulder at what’s gone. I’ve had a good rest since the Lions tour, I feel in great shape and the rest of the lads feel the same.’

England may have arrived at Corry the captain by default but there is no disputing they have the right man at the helm at the right time. Andy Robinson’s original choice, Jonny Wilkinson, seemed almost fated not to do the job and when flu brought an end to Jason Robinson’s six- match run, the coach turned to the No 8, whose response suggested he probably should have been doing it all along.

Despite England reeling off five wins in a row against Australia during the three years culminating in the World Cup final, Corry is still to appear in a winning team against the Wallabies — for his country as opposed to the Lions. A repeat of the first Test rout inflicted at The Gabba in 2001 by a predominantly English team would do him nicely.