Perhaps someone in the England set-up should remind the head coach Steve Borthwick that last year’s Rugby World Cup semifinal in Paris was played in wet, inclement conditions.
That’s if the talk in the England media of bringing back the tall and safe under the high ball but ponderous Freddy Steward at fullback and other possible changes to the team that lost narrowly to New Zealand and Australia in the first two autumn internationals is inspired by the England camp itself. It could just be speculation of course, which is a different thing.
Either way, if England want to play mind games with the Springboks, who they face at Twickenham (Allianz Stadium) on Saturday, the possibility of rewinding the clock to go back to the team and template that so nearly worked against the eventual RWC winners is a good way to go about it.
For if Steward was returned to the team at fullback when it is announced on Thursday, and George Ford at flyhalf and possibly Jack van Poorvliet at scrumhalf, it would signal a dramatic shift to what England have done so far this autumn. Indeed, it would be a shift from what they’ve been working towards since the global tournament ended in the last week of last October.
Of course Owen Farrell, who captained England in the World Cup, is gone from the mix. He retired from international rugby straight after the tournament and is now playing his club rugby in France. So that partly explains why Marcus Smith has played so much at flyhalf since then.
But it is also because England flicked a switch at an early stage of the last Six Nations and started to put more emphasis on evolving away from their conservative, safety first strategy towards a template that was more attacking.
PERFORMANCES OPPOSED TO RESULTS SUGGEST IMPROVEMENT
If you look purely at the results, it hasn’t worked. But if you look at the close margins of defeat to New Zealand in New Zealand, and the two games so far this November have also been losses by less than a score, plus factor in that England beat Ireland and were only just pipped by France after recovering from their defeat to Scotland in the Six Nations, progress was being made.
Apart from all the talk about the impact being made on the way the game is being played by the law changes around escort runners for catchers under contestable kicks, what may inspire England to move back to the more conservative template that would be reflected by the above-mentioned team changes is memory.
As in the memory of how for 65 minutes of last year’s semifinal England looked like they were going to beat the Boks in a game no-one gave them a chance.
By fronting the Boks physically and playing a good tactical kicking game, with Steward so good in the air, they made their opponents look very ordinary. Indeed, that was easily the worst Bok performance of the World Cup, inferior even to the one defeat they suffered in a Pool game against Ireland.
BOKS MADE TACTICAL ERRORS LAST TIME
The catch though was that the game was played in conditions that definitely favoured the England strategy. And the Boks might have made a mistake in their preparations - a week earlier, with Manie Libbok calling the shots at flyhalf, they had stayed in the game against an excellent French team by matching their three first half tries in a pulsating and unforgettable quarterfinal.
The Boks had prospered from their ability to counter and attack off transition ball, and Libbok’s retention at No 10 indicated they wished to do the same in the semifinal. In the early stages, with the Boks appearing to rush things and thus make mistakes against the singularly focused England, they stuck with the original plan.
That the Boks got out of jail was because the coaches yanked Libbok off the field early, and the power and scrumming technique of replacement loosehead prop swung the momentum in that phase so comprehensively South Africa’s way in the last quarter.
Would the Boks have been in that hole though had the game been played on a clear night rather than a cloudy and wet one? Well, if England come up with a repeat of the strategy they deployed in Paris, we could find out at the weekend, for the weather forecast for London on Saturday is cloudy conditions, but no rain. And no rain in the buildup either.
So the Boks should be running onto a dry field, and that could mean that any plan from England to replicate their strategy from last year’s semifinal backfires horribly. The law banning escort runners for players fielding kicks would be one of the main reasons England would consider the strategy.
Steward announced himself at fullback in the game England won narrowly at Twickenham against the Boks when it was still the Eddie Jones era in 2021. The Boks bombed him incessantly in that game. He is also good at getting the ball back in aerial combat in offensive situations.
HOSTS’ DEFENSIVE PROBLEM MITIGATES AGAINST LOW SCORING GAME
Ford is also a more kicking orientated flyhalf than Smith and if a box kicking extravaganza is the plan because of the law change that was announced just a few weeks ago, the limitations to Ford’s attacking game won’t matter so much.
But the rub is that Steward has been exposed for his lack of pace, most notably when France put 50 points past England 18 months ago. And given that there has been some dysfunction in the England defensive system subsequent to the departure of former Bok assistant coach Felix Jones, who had implemented the Bok blitz system, a dry game could mean England need to score lots of points and not rely on a low scoring game like the RWC semifinal was.
With Cheslin Kolbe and Kurt-Lee Arendse likely to be back, and probably Aphelele Fassi too, the Boks will be poised to counter-attack with devastating effect if England overdo the contestable kicks and are not 100 per cent on target.
The Boks are also only announcing their team on Thursday so we will have to wait until then to see what their strategy is likely to be. But given how poor the England defence was against Australia, and how good the Boks were on attack with Libbok at No 10 the last time the full strength team played against Argentina, we could well see the Stormers man starting at pivot and Handre Pollard backing up.
If it is a dry day it would give Libbok a chance to reverse what went wrong last October and the Boks could end up capitalising on any England perception that the way to beat the world champions is to turn the game into an arm-wrestle.