SIX NATIONS SPECIAL
England running out of time for World Cup, warns Jones
THOSE of an England persuasion hoping that Eddie Jones’ men are merely enduring a brief blip should look away now.
The head coach fears his team are being undermined by a glaring fault which may take 18 months to fix.
Jones’ verdict on his team’s second consecutive defeat was that it exposed bad breakdown habits which must 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 simply 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 Six 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 No1 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 this 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 ball-carrier. 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 under this largely successful regime. Without ball-carrying momentum and an ability to protect their own possession, England’s Plan A simply unravelled. 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 and our attack hasn’t fired recently.
‘It was a bit of a brick wall we were running into, but we believed we would tire them out.’
The stuttering efforts in attack will revive calls for Jones to bring in a specialist coach to assist him. The concern is that England’s peak was in Australia, back in June 2016.
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. We’re dented in terms of our confidence. I don’t think we ever thought we were invincible, but we were confident.’
This is not quite a crisis yet, but if Jones is right about how long it will take to break those bad habits, there is an inevitable crisis looming.