THE SCRUMS DON’T ADD UP
Jones struggles to unpack Roses’ collapse in Yokohama as they go down with a whimper
WHEN Eddie Jones finally sits down with his team at Twickenham to sift through the wreckage of what might have been in Yokohama, the review will be almost as painful as the crushing let-down of the final itself.
For England it will be Investigation Icarus – the team that flew too close to the sun and crashed back down to earth.
In the search for reasons Jones will go over the emotional slump from the semi-final high and the possibility that a team which dethroned world champions New Zealand got ahead of itself going into the final.
He will look into the muddled thinking and execution on the field and the logistics failure off it which saw a team that prides itself on attention to detail arrive 20 minutes later than scheduled for its biggest game.
At the top of the agenda though will be the scrum.
For all the new horizons of a Japanese World Cup, rugby union still ends where it starts – with the physical battle. Lose that against most sides and a team is struggling to win the game. Lose that against South Africa and you are squelched under a giant green steamroller.
England gave up a catastrophic five scrum penalties on Saturday. A weapon became a weakness confronted by a magnificent Springbok pack right on the emotional edge and England paid the price in gold.
Jones said: “I don’t know why. It’s sport. We’ve got 23 individuals, they’ve got 23 and the psychological level of teams is never constant. They’re always changing,
we weren’t there on the day and we got caught.
“They won a significant area of the game which was the scrum which tended to trickle down into the rest of the game.
“We couldn’t get on the front foot and if you can’t get on the front foot then you look like a team that lacks ideas, lacks energy, looks tired. All those things come into play.
“Something slightly wasn’t right and we couldn’t fix it on the field. Full credit to South Africa they scrummed well and that’s the game.”
Would it all have unfolded differently for England had Maro Itoje not accidentally knocked off Kyle Sinckler with the game in its infancy? Possibly. As it was poor Dan Cole had to suffer in the grasp of destructive Tendai Mtawarira – aka The Beast.
Mtawarira, who at 34, signed off his Test career in style, said: “Kyle has had a great World Cup and for him to come off so
early in the game was unfortunate. As rugby players, we never enjoy seeing someone come off with a bad injury but they lost somebody up front who has been performing really well,” South Africa coach Rassie Erasmus thought his side’s props were fresher because of his early second-half substitution policy. But Cole and Mako Vunipola, who was hauled off after his own struggles against Frans Malherbe, actually played fewer minutes at the tournament than the Bok starters. Vunipola’s evaluation was that England’s scrum – and for that read the team as a whole – were simply too passive. He said: “We probably sat back a little bit but I can’t put my finger on why.” The scrum is drilled every day by England with the props swapped in and out so different front-row combinations train together. Unfamiliarity should not have been an issue. Maybe selection was. It was Jones’ choice to leave tight-head Harry Williams, who was until Cole’s recall Sinckler’s deputy, at home. But Cole, like the rest of the England side, had been excellent the previous week against New Zealand. Just why they fell away so badly is the question that will consume England management tomorrow but finding the answers won’t change the result. It was a moment in time, a golden opportunity – and it has gone.