BROKEN AND BATTERED
Eddie admits his England side are running out of time to eliminate bad habits
ALL THOSE hoping that England are merely enduring a brief blip should look away now. Eddie Jones fears his team are being undermined by a glaring fault which may take 18 months to fix.
The head coach’s verdict on his side’s second consecutive defeat was that it exposed bad breakdown habits which need to be eliminated.
The trouble is, according to Jones, such a painstaking process may drag on until the World Cup next year. On that basis, there could be hard times ahead.
France conquered England by dominating them at the ruck, just as Scotland had a fortnight earlier — albeit with a greater emphasis on sheer power rather than poaching prowess. As was the case at Murrayfield, the visitors had no answers and in their futile quest to halt the onslaught, they conceded a deluge of costly penalties.
Mathieu Bastareaud and his fellow Gallic scavengers stopped England achieving any fluency or momentum. Their collision impact and limpet work over the ball shut down the visitors’ attack to inspire a momentous French victory which shattered fading English title hopes. In fact, they could finish as low as fifth in this season’s NatWest 6 Nations.
So much for the ‘three-peat’ crusade.
Jones’ side will today drop below new European champions Ireland into third place in the World Rugby rankings. They had been gunning for the No 1 spot, long occupied by the All Blacks.
This is the first fall since the Australian took charge. The balance of power is shifting and the doomsday scenario on Saturday would involve Joe Schmidt’s men clinching a Grand Slam at Twickenham, to leave England with their worst championship return for 12 years.
Asked to make sense of it all, Jones focused on the breakdown. ‘We’ve got to break old habits and that’s one of the hardest things to do,’ he said. ‘It’s a sizeable but fixable problem. We can address it, but the reality is that we probably won’t get better at it until the World Cup. Our players tend to sit back and not go with the ballcarrier. We’re working hard to change that habit but when we’re under pressure it comes back, so we get a gap between ball-carrier and second man. I think we’ve always had that problem and these games have exposed it.’
In an interview with the BBC yesterday, Jones suggested that his team had reached a ‘plateau’. That implies a lack of progress but, in fact, they have gone backwards.
The performance against France was comfortably the worst produced under this largely successful regime. Without ball-carrying momentum and an ability to protect their own possession, England’s Plan A unravelled in the face of fierce French resistance. There was no sign of a Plan B.
Cohesion was chased out of town by confusion and indecision. Yet again, England seemed incapable of adapting on the hoof, but the problem underpinning the whole sorry mess on Saturday was that they were eclipsed in the physical combat by opponents who were without several key men.
There was a late charge for redemption led by the forward replacements, especially James Haskell, Kyle Sinckler and Joe Marler, who brought new power and ferocity. Jonny May’s try kept the flame flickering, but it was too little, too late.
Afterwards, the party line was that they were just ‘two or three per cent’ off, which was wildly untrue. Cracks in the facade which had been hidden are now out in the open.
Danny Care lamented the latest example of indiscipline, saying: ‘We let them into the game. We weren’t streetwise enough. Our attack has not fired so far in this tournament.
‘It was a bit of a brick wall we were running into, but we believed in our systems and that we would tire them out.’
That cannot be the extent of English creative ambition; to keep bashing away and hope the other lot run out of gas.
There is so much talk about the commitment to improve, but that is not happening. The stuttering efforts in attack will revive calls for Jones to bring in a specialist coach to assist him.
England’s post-World Cup revival was founded on fitness and aggression, mental fortitude and physical intensity, but attempts to add potent layers to this narrow repertoire have stalled.
The nagging concern is that England’s peak was in Australia, back in June 2016.
Rarely have they reached those heights since, aside from when Scotland were dismantled at Twickenham last year. There was energy and spark in Argentina last summer while the Lions contingent were away in New Zealand, but that has not served as a springboard.
Winning became a habit which partially masked flaws, but failing to score a point for the last hour at home to Wales raised an alarm which has kept ringing since, in Edinburgh and Paris.
Asked if the aura that England had established has been lost, Jamie George said: ‘I guess so, perception-wise. We’re dented in terms of our confidence. I don’t think we ever thought we were invincible, but we went into games confident.’
The management must consider changes in the knowledge that their team needs an injection of dynamic power up front.
Haskell and Sinckler may come into the reckoning to start, with that in mind.
What England would give to have Billy Vunipola fit and available. Or Sam Underhill. Or Tom Curry. Jones and Co will be reluctant to break up the Ford-Farrell alliance, but it may be up for debate. What is certain is that if Dylan Hartley is fit again, he will start as captain, given that Jones summarised George’s display at hooker as ‘workmanlike’.
All of a sudden, England will be regarded as underdogs, which will be an unfamiliar change of status. What should have been a title decider is now destined to be a face- saving exercise fraught with danger.
This is not quite a crisis yet, but if Jones is right about how long it will take to break those bad breakdown habits, there is an inevitable crisis looming.