Loose Pass: England’s day of reckoning, the odd choices for Fiji’s home matches and the quality of the second tier
England and Fiji's players in action during the opening round of the Nations Championship.
This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with England’s day of reckoning, the odd choices for Fiji’s home matches and the quality of the second tier…
All on the line for England and Borthwick
It is, on reflection of the past 12 or even 24 months, a bit of an oddity that Wales have mauled their way to the top of the northern half of the Nations Championship table. It is a little less of an oddity, on the basis of the past 12 months, that England find themselves adrift at the bottom already.
Steve Borthwick’s men were not handed the strongest cards when the fixtures were announced, with a match in Liverpool against Fiji sandwiched between long-haul trips to South Africa and Argentina. The expectation back in February, back when England had roundly trounced Wales without breaking sweat but had come up significantly short in defeats to Ireland and Scotland, was that Borthwick would fly a first-choice squad to South Africa and from there to Argentina, while a more experimental squad would be preparing for Fiji at home.
And while the rotation is still expected, experiments will, or should be, out of the window. For after the dire display in South Africa, there is widespread belief and acceptance that anything less than a convincing win over Fiji may dilute the support for Borthwick that the RFU has so frequently been forced to pledge.
Accuracy, discipline and decision-making have all been identified as lacking in defeat, which leaves little room for any positives to be taken out of Johannesburg. Those who would point to the fightback from 17-0 down after 12 minutes are still failing to acknowledge that such a scoreline is close to unforgiveable, failing still further to acknowledge how obvious it was that South Africa responded to a half-time rollocking with a visible uptick in intensity, something England were far from looking capable of.
The whole thing is looking a bit of a mess. The start of this season was supposed to herald the onset of the full suite of those quasi-central contract things which would give Borthwick more control and sway in terms of key player freshness and availability. Since then, some players have moved to France to join others in being frozen out by RFU red tape, while Maro Itoje requires rest because of fatigue. More influential coaches have jumped ship or been chess-pieced around, and the nation’s supposed top analyst left as well.
A year out from the World Cup, the other five nations all look as though the trajectory is suitably upward, with perhaps the exception of Italy, while England head into the weekend facing the prospect of a rotated team coming a cropper in England against Fiji. That includes Wales, whose low point was far lower than England’s is currently. But until that trajectory does tick upwards, those comparisons will increasingly be drawn, and defeat for a rotated team on Saturday against a Fiji team scenting vulnerability would leave the clamour for change deafening.
Organisers miss a trick
Granted, Liverpool is set to be warmer than Suva this weekend. There are some beaches, although the lack of coral reefs and palm trees is harder to compensate for.
There’s little chance of Fiji’s players trotting out onto the Hill Dickinson turf and feeling at home anyway, considering the large portion of the fans will hail from, and be located in, the country of the nominally away team.
We know – or at least we are well-convinced – that it makes commercial sense for Fiji to play home games of this Nations Championship in Europe, where a huge number of the players are based and where there are bigger stadia to be filled, in turn filling the coffers.
But why play Wales in Wales, England in England (even if it is not Twickenham), and Scotland in Scotland? You could happily muddle those three up and play, say, Fiji v England in Wales and fill the stadium with tens of thousands of local fans cheering lustily for the Fijians. English fans would doubtless cheer on Fiji having a pop at Scotland, and even if the historical animosity between Scotland and Wales is a mite less than either and England, we are talking about Fiji here. That’s almost everybody’s favourite other team at the moment.
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Looking up
Once Saturday’s marathon had been digested, it was worth scouring the internet for the highlights packages of the second-tier matches in World Rugby’s Nations Cup.
The drama of the USA’s odd-point-in-60 win over Portugal was surpassed by the extraordinary finale to Canada’s 42-apiece draw with Spain. Zimbabwe fired all sorts of warning shots to Wales while Chile and Samoa continued their long-term upward trajectories. And it was good to see Georgia playing and enjoying again after the dreadful scandal saga that dragged through the spring.
But it was the quality that caught the attention. No longer are these tier two teams reliant upon generic structures and systems; there are athletes here with skill levels fully in sync with the game’s finest, while the decision-making in moments has improved beyond all recognition. The game is in good health from the bottom up; incredible what can be achieved when attention and resources are directed to the lower levels.
Something for the RFU to think about there, especially if England come a cropper against Fiji.