England rookies will be facing hostile inferno ... I fear for their chances
THIS young England team will never have experienced anything like what’s going to hit them at Murrayfield next week. It’s Edinburgh’s first Six Nations game with a full crowd for two years, so it’s going to be incredibly hostile.
The place is an inferno. You sink or swim in those atmospheres. It’s the first time guys like Marcus Smith and Freddie Steward have experienced it and that could work against them. My head is saying Scotland will come out on top — but I hope they don’t.
As soon as you arrive at the stadium on the team bus, you know the crowd f ****** hate you. It’s electric.
I used to love it. On the bus journey in you have to drive around the stadium concourse behind these slow, marching bagpipers. It takes forever. You look out of the window and just see people hurling abuse. Kids, grandparents, anyone. There’s no point trying to block it out because it will catch up with you. You’ve got to embrace it.
Then you get off the bus and all these kilted-up bagpipers get in the way while you are trying to get to your bags. It’s almost like they are doing it on purpose.
For Scotland, it’s their biggest game of the year. They won’t admit it, but it is. They come flying out of the blocks and if you don’t start well, it’s a hell of a long 80 minutes. Any mistake you make, and they are on to you.
The crowd are off their seats and the energy and intimidation lifts. If you don’t feed off it, it becomes unbearable, suffocating and you start to make errors. It grows and grows and suddenly you’re dead meat. It’s such an unknown for England’s young players and that could be their undoing this time around. Eddie Jones will be desperate for Courtney Lawes to get fit because you need all your experience for days like this.
Scotland will want to get into Smith and rough him up because he’s a key player. They did the same with George Ford in 2018 before the match, with Ryan Wilson pushing and shoving him in the tunnel. They will pick out the young guys in the England team and try to unsettle them. Win or lose, it will be a valuable learning experience.
Jones’s comments in the press about going after Scotland are spot-on. His players will see the headlines on their phones and bank it. It might put a bit of doubt in the Scottish camp, too. He will be using that message from the very first meeting. That will be their tagline: Go after them. If England are going to win, they need to go after them early, silence the crowd and kill their confidence. I think we will have a decent idea of who is going to win within 15 minutes.
In 2018, we tried to feel our way into the game and it backfired badly. Finn Russell destroyed us. He was whipping passes everywhere and we were
It’s so hard to read Russell. He puts so much doubt in the defender’s mind
scrambling. Russell has got the box of tricks. You think you have got him and then he drops someone in with a disguised pass. He’s got the long pass, the short pass and a whole range of kicks.
If the defence flies up he will chip over the top and then next time you will hesitate, so he will pick you off with a different pass. It’s so hard to read the guy and he puts so much doubt in the defender’s mind.
England need to go up there and dominate the set-piece. Joe Marler, Kyle Sinckler and Jonny Hill are key to that. They’ve got to kick for territory and be ruthless when they are in Scotland’s half, because there won’t be many opportunities.
In defence, guys like Tom Curry and Maro Itoje need to be suffocating. There is a lot of experience in the Scottish ranks now and also a bit of stardust.
We would always put a bit of extra focus on Stuart Hogg at full-back. He’s one of their key players but you can expose him. If Smith and Ben Youngs can pressurise him with their kicking then it nullifies the other parts of his game. As soon as Hogg catches Youngs’s box kicks, pile into him. He’s fantastic at running in space but if he’s on the floor under a pile of bodies, he can’t use his running game for a good couple of phases.
Looking at the bigger picture, England aren’t going to go all the way to the World Cup without the odd slip-up. This young group will learn from a defeat or two over the next 18 months and be better for it. Naturally, there will be a load of scrutiny if they lose in Edinburgh but it wouldn’t be a total disaster.
They have had to deal with a bit of adversity already this week with a fire, moving hotels and meetings in pubs. Jones will be loving it. Having to adapt through the week, with people going down injured, Covid and changing schedules could be a blessing in disguise. Sometimes a perfect run-up isn’t the best preparation.
England could create a siege-like underdog mentality that sees them through. My heart says they will win it, but my head says they won’t.