Farrell’s 50th is party to forget on off day for England at HQ
Centre’s milestone turns into nightmare and side lose touch with qualities Jones has tried to instill
Better than Jonny Wilkinson? Eddie Jones, who has offered this very prognosis about Owen Farrell, is rarely one for damning with faint praise. He prefers his usual grandiose superlatives: George Ford, Farrell’s midfield sidekick, can be “better than Beauden Barrett”, the reigning world player of the year, while Maro Itoje, in characteristic beast mode in the line-out against Italy yesterday, “will win a World Cup”. It is Farrell, though, in whom the indomitable spirit of this young England team is supposed to reside.
Not this time, mind. Not on what should have been a celebratory occasion, as he earned his halfcentury of Test caps with his ears still burning from the tributes for his talents. “A perfectionist, as competitive as anyone I know,” Alex Goode called him. “Will go down as an all-time great,” Richard Wigglesworth, his half-back partner at Saracens, predicted. Except Farrell marked his milestone with what was, by his lofty standards, a nightmare.
Celebrated for his metronomic consistency off the tee, he made just three kicks out of seven. Granted, a few blustery squalls were hovering around Twickenham to push Farrell’s efforts off course, but as Jones never tires of reminding us, rugby is a winter sport. And Farrell, just like many of his England teammates – Joe Launchbury and Jack Nowell being honourable exceptions – was bafflingly off-key here. Poor in his kicking from hand, uncertain in defence and fleetingly petulant, not least when he shoulder-barged Edoardo Gori to take the Italian scrum-half out of the game, he had a 50th to forget.
Even the finest sporting collectives, of course, have offcolour days. The All Blacks were famously filleted by England on this stage in 2012, even if there was a suggestion that some of them had succumbed to food poisoning the week before. But at times yesterday England were so shambolic, so out of touch with the discipline that Jones has sought to instill, that it seemed as if some players had forgotten how to play.
James Haskell’s first-half cry for help to referee Romain Poite – “for clarity, on the ruck thing, what do we need to do?” – will go down as the line of this or any other season.
If they looked discombobulated, this might be explained by Italian tactics that were likened by Martin Bayfield, the former England lock, to the stuff of rugby league. Creatively interpreting the laws of the ruck, encouraging Sergio Parisse to unsettle Danny Care with his positioning, even using the post to set up a superbly opportunistic try for Giovanbattista Venditti: Italy threw England all manner of curveballs.
Jones was scrambling for metaphors for what he had just seen. “In football, they have ‘park the bus’,” the Australian said, seething. “I don’t know what that was, but it was bigger than a bus.” Ultimately, he settled upon a comparison with his beloved cricket. “Trevor Chappell rugby,” he declared, invoking the notorious occasion in 1981 when Chappell bowled an underarm daisy-cutter to prevent New Zealand from winning a one-day international with a six.
It was a parallel as disrespectful as it was absurd. Chappell was guilty, by his antics, of bringing sport’s entire code of morality into question.
Italy, by contrast, were guilty of nothing worse than trying to win a game by unconventional means, and of showing up the folly of Jones’s forecast that England would “take them to the cleaners”.
The indignant head coach’s comments did not come across as a plausible defence of the sanctity of rugby, but as a churlish, embittered reaction to the fact that Italy had not allowed the hosts to put 70 points past them.