England wary of a 2019 World Cup repeat after the ‘hype’ of Ireland win

England will use their 2019 World Cup final hiding by South Africa to fuel the revenge mission against France in their final 2024 Six Nations match in Lyon.

That loss to the Springboks came a week after perhaps England’s greatest display in beating New Zealand in Yokohama.

Five years on, Steve Borthwick’s team is coming off their best performance since that All Blacks win. However, it knows they must learn from the mistakes that cost it so dear against the Boks to avoid another crash landing.

“We we awful”

At stake is more than Le Crunch bragging rights; they are playing to avenge the humiliation of their seven-try thrashing by France at Twickenham a year ago, England’s biggest-ever home defeat.

“We were awful,” captain Jamie George said. “It wasn’t even just the result – France were great, France played well, played smart, but we didn’t work.

“The bare minimum of what we should be about is fight and showing character. That game was the complete opposite. We gave up; we looked tired, and we didn’t front up physically.

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“That isn’t the sort of team we want to be, and it still hurts me to this day. Especially doing it at Twickenham, with the things we’ve spoken about trying to make Twickenham a really hard place to come to.

“That is certainly in the motivation. We achieved something special last weekend, we’re very aware of that, everyone felt that.

“But being able to back it up is a huge motivation for me. Good teams react well to setbacks, great teams make sure they back it up.”

Learning from World Cup defeat

England were not alone in thinking they were a great team after soundly beating holders New Zealand in their 2019 semi-final. Everyone told them so.

Yet they dropped off a cliff seven days later as Siya Kolisi lifted the trophy for the first time after a South Africa victory, so complete England are still trying to work out what happened.

“We believed the hype, kept living it for three or four days afterwards,” recalled George with a grimace. “You’re in a World Cup final week, and I had every distraction under the sun.

“People wanting to come over, thousands of people asking you for tickets, people from school coming out the woodwork who I hadn’t spoken to for 10 years.

“It’s amazing, how cool is that, something that I’ve done has reconnected me with someone I went to primary school with. It’s great but it can be really distracting and I probably learnt that the hard way.

“We probably got it wrong in 2019,” George added. “We definitely got it wrong. We didn’t reach the highs of the week before. You could see it in our energy and our life.

“It’s a World Cup final, you think you’re going to be absolutely buzzing. I was buzzing mentally, it was almost a situation that I was trying to convince myself that I was buzzing rather than having anything in my legs to be able to go and do it.

“What I learnt is that you need to be able to give yourself the space to get away from things and reflect. Do what you’ve got to do.

“On the flip side of it, the training week is so important to what you do at the weekend. You recover really well to make sure you can spike a little bit in training, come back down and then spike again.”

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Not repeating the same mistake

Borthwick arrived back in camp after last week’s Ireland win with the same thought as his captain. The congratulatory texts took them straight back to that week in Japan.

“It was one of the first things I spoke to him about when we met up again on Sunday and he was already all over it,” said George.

“I learned a big lesson in 2019 after the New Zealand performance around things like emotional highs and lows. Saturday was probably as emotional a performance as we’ve had since 2019.

“It was a physical Test match. Emotion was high so physically and emotionally you’re right up there. You need to allow yourself to be able to come down to then pick back up and spike at the right time. On the whole (this week) we’ve done that very, very well.”

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