Comment: England’s troubling midfield burden might just be Steve Borthwick’s most prized asset
England head coach Steve Borthwick has options at number 13.
Four men are in contention for the England number 13 jersey and none of them play remotely the same game. It looks like a coach who can’t make his mind up. But is it actually the best thing he owns going into a World Cup year?
Let’s take a look.
The argument
Nothing about England‘s midfield in 2026 looked anything remotely like a plan, either in shape, tactic or selection. Ollie Lawrence spent January rehabbing in Girona, Henry Slade came in and out of a Six Nations that finished fifth and included a first-ever defeat to Italy, Max Ojomoh was handed the outside centre jersey against a France XV in June, Benhard Janse van Rensburg needed World Rugby approval before he could be picked at all and scored with his first touch on debut against Fiji, and Joe Marchant spent the season in the Top 14 before signing for Sale.
Set that against a championship in which England conceded a record 151 points and equalled Italy’s 2002 record of nine cards, and it reads like a coach shuffling a backline without really knowing what assets he has.
We don’t buy it, and neither will you once you’ve looked at the numbers. What Borthwick actually has, moving into 2026/7, is the luxury of four outside centres doing four genuinely different jobs, all of them pickable at Test level, and there isn’t another coach in the northern hemisphere, save for Fabien Galthié, who can say the same.
Lawrence remains part of the wider midfield argument, but with Janse van Rensburg increasingly looking like England’s gainline solution at 12, the more intriguing fight is immediately outside him. And we see a dark horse running up on the inside rails that excites us greatly – in the 6’1″ 102kg shape of Saints’ Tom Litchfield.
Four men, four completely different jobs
Let’s set the evidence out properly. These are last season’s league numbers expressed per 80 minutes, with one caveat, which is that Marchant’s come from the Top 14 whilst the other three are Prem, so his row isn’t quite like for like.
Tom Litchfield: 63.3 metres, 2.67 defenders beaten, 0.67 tries and 0.42 try assists per 80, at 95 per cent pass completion. He is the destructor, and the raw figures are quite remarkable, because 758 metres and 32 beaten defenders came out of 958 minutes.
Max Ojomoh: 0.63 try assists and 10.42 completed passes per 80, which puts him inside the top five per cent of Prem centres for assists. He’s more of the creator, and six assists in 768 minutes is class leading, although his 83 per cent pass completion is the lowest of the three Prem men.
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Henry Slade: 16.26 touches, 9.07 passes and 6.98 tackles per 80 across 1,491 minutes. He is the controller, effectively a second fly-half wearing 13, and often standing there, and he carried the biggest defensive workload of the four.
Joe Marchant: 23.3 metres and 113 tackles from 1,481 minutes. He is the specialist, a man whose value has never been captured by a carrying column, who started throughout a World Cup campaign that finished a point short of beating South Africa, and who has one of the best aerial chase games around.
The comparison that really helps the argument is efficiency rather than volume. Litchfield produced more metres, more beaten defenders and more try assists than Slade whilst having roughly half the touches, which works out at 5.1 metres per touch against Slade’s 2.0. That isn’t Slade being wasteful, and we’d ask you not to read it that way; it’s two men doing unrelated jobs, and both doing them extremely well.
Divide by touches rather than by minutes and the profiles sharpen again, because counting statistics reward whoever played the most rugby, which here is Slade. Three numbers do the work:
Metres per touch: Litchfield 5.09, Marchant 3.22, Slade 1.95, Ojomoh 1.19.
Try involvements per 80 minutes: Litchfield 1.09, Ojomoh 0.73, Slade 0.64, Marchant 0.38.
Completed passes as a share of touches: Ojomoh 66.2 per cent, Slade 55.8 per cent, Litchfield 36.9 per cent, Marchant 31.3 per cent.
That is a direct try involvement every 11.5 touches for Litchfield against one every 25.3 for Slade, and two-thirds of everything Ojomoh receives he passes on. Marchant, on 5.22 tries per 100 touches against Litchfield’s 5.37, is a better finisher than 431 metres suggests, the difference being that he creates little, but possesses the best aerial game around. Those three rows stop the table asking who accumulated the most and start it asking what happens when England give the man the ball.
And before anyone writes off Henry Slade
Don’t.
He’s the most experienced of the four by a distance with 74 England caps, against Marchant’s 26, Ojomoh’s two and Litchfield is yet to win one. Slade sits in the top five per cent of Prem centres for passing, he played more minutes last season than any of the others and still finished with the highest tackle rate at 6.98 per 80, and there isn’t a director of rugby in the league who would turn him down if he came knocking for a contract.
He’s also the man you want when a Test is tight and wet and comes down to whether somebody in midfield can put the ball into the right corner with eight minutes on the clock. England have lost matches in that exact scenario and they’ll lose more. The problem isn’t Slade at all, it’s that this England backline already contains three men who do a version of what he does, with Fin Smith at 10, Janse van Rensburg at 12 and George Furbank arriving from 15.
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And to further complicate matters, Janse van Rensburg himself can play 13, with Seb Atkinson taking the carrying job at 12, and his debut involvement against Fiji came as Slade’s temporary replacement in the outside channel. But shuffling those two, in cricketing terms, is surely a case of changing the bowler without changing the bowling, and it lacks variety and counterpoint, despite possessing an immense physicality. The value in what Borthwick has isn’t five men for two shirts; it’s four genuinely different deliveries and a choice about which one suits the pitch.
Why four right answers beat one very good one
The instinct in English rugby is always to treat this as a problem that needs solving; find the best 13, put him in the shirt, leave him there for four years and stop talking about it. It misses what Test rugby actually asks of that channel now, because the four sides England most need to beat all ask something different in it and the answer can change from week to week.
Against South Africa, with the ball in the air and a rush defence coming off the line, you might want Marchant’s reading of the channel and a chaser who arrives at Smith’s kick rather than two seconds after it. Against France, whose attack now runs a distributor on both edges, you need somebody organising width defensively, and that is where Slade’s experience in the channel and his kicking game become valuable. Against a side you expect to prise open, Litchfield turns half a gap into a try. And against a side that defends narrow and dares you to move it, Ojomoh puts somebody else through the hole. Borthwick has spent two years being told he’s a conservative selector; what he’s quietly assembled is a position where the jersey becomes a matchday variable rather than a permanent appointment.
But it only counts if it’s a choice
There’s an honest counterweight here, because churn and optionality look identical from the outside, and this is all about asset deployment.
France, it has to be said, have more centres than Westfield. Galthié left Gaël Fickou out of his Six Nations squad altogether, a 98-cap centre who had captained the side in November, and dropped Damian Penaud and Grégory Alldritt with him. He then used five different midfielders across the five rounds, including a debut at 12 for the 20-year-old Fabien Brau-Boirie in Cardiff, with Pierre-Louis Barassi wearing 13 against England on the final day.
They won the championship anyway, and whilst switching between Matthieu Jalibert and Thomas Ramos at fly-half as well, because the control of the side never sat in any one jersey; the rotation was designed. England’s wasn’t designed at all, it was forced, by injury, by a collapse in results and by a squad that turned up for the Italy game with nobody certain who was organising what. Cohesion is real and it’s bought with time. Four options only become an asset when a coach chooses between them deliberately, in advance, with a reason he can look the discarded man in the eye and explain.
The second cost is connectivity. There’s a version of this England side in which Alex Mitchell, Smith, Litchfield and Tommy Freeman play together simply because they already do it every week at Northampton, and there’s a version in which you pick the best individual for each opponent and rebuild the understanding from scratch every fortnight. Both are respectable standpoints but the second only wins if the calls are made early enough for the combination to be trained rather than improvised, and on last season’s evidence that is where England came unstuck.
What the autumn can tell us
Which brings us to a date. Litchfield finished last season with a hat-trick in Northampton’s semi-final win over Leicester and started the final at 13 against Slade himself, which is about as direct a comparison as club rugby ever hands you, and it went his way. Marchant hasn’t played a Prem game since 2023 and arrives at Sale with everything to prove, the league programme starting on September 26.
So there are five rounds of evidence between now and the November window. Marchant begins with the advantage of proven Test pedigree; Litchfield with the strongest claim on club form. Ojomoh solves a bench, because he genuinely covers 12 and 13, creates, carries and can change the shape of an attack from the 23 jersey. And Slade is the one England will reach for when a Test needs controlling rather than breaking open, a genuine bench option, able to cover centre, and in an emergency, fly-half and full-back, and there will be at least one of those between here and Australia.
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Call it churn, call it indecision, call it a midfield crisis if you must, but four right answers to four different questions is a problem worth having in the season before a World Cup, and a considerably better place to be than March, when England had lost four Six Nations matches, shipped 151 points and still couldn’t tell you who their best two centres were. The interesting part now is whether Borthwick trusts it enough to pick to the opponent, or whether he does what English coaches nearly always do and settles on one man for the sake of a quiet life.
For us, the first choice needs to include an examination of Litchfield; his stats, his performances and his silverware demand it. Let’s hope it happens.
