Opinion: The issues blighting England and the one statement that says everything
Steve Borthwick and Maro Itoje face the hard questions after England's loss to Italy.
Rome, Saturday evening. Italy 23, England 18. The scoreboard told a story, but not the whole one. For the first time in 33 attempts across 144 years of this fixture, the Azzurri beat England. It was historic, emotional, and entirely deserved and for Steve Borthwick’s side, it was the third successive defeat in a Six Nations they entered as genuine title contenders. By Sunday morning, the RFU CEO had issued a statement. Make of that what you will.
Bill Sweeney told us that England’s coaching team are “working tirelessly”, that the RFU remain “fully committed”, and that everyone will “work together to understand and rectify” what went wrong. It is, as these things go, a perfectly constructed piece of institutional language; warm enough to suggest concern, and absolutely vague enough to commit to nothing.
Sir Humphrey Appleby once observed “that it is impossible to effectively stab someone in the back until you are first fully behind them.” Sweeney is now fully behind Borthwick.
The precipice
The Maro Itoje sin-binning has attracted predictable fury, and the call itself was marginal, possibly wrong. But that debate misses the point.
A man standing on the precipice, with his team still in with a chance, cannot afford the gamble. Whether the intervention was legal or not, the calculation was wrong. A Test captain in the 72nd minute, protecting a two-point lead, watching a team-mate already serving time, does not roll the dice. That is the opposite of leadership and the antithesis of thinking clearly under pressure.
And you cannot compress 79 minutes of awful rugby into one referee’s decision and call it an explanation anyway. England had territory, the scoreboard, and, for the most part, 15 men. What they didn’t have was the capacity to close a Test match. Italy were the better side for long stretches of the second half. The sin-bin didn’t create England’s broader problems, more over it merely delivered the verdict.
Selection judgement: Borthwick’s Achilles heel
Elliot Daly at full-back raised eyebrows before kick-off and answered none of the questions during the match. The defensive holes were there for all to see; a player of his profile, at this stage of his career, should not be leaving them at Test level – and in any case, we all know what Italian drivers do when encountering a speed bump in Rome. They treat it as a challenge to their manhood and attack it with all the gusto of a Ferrari leaving pole position under launch control, which is precisely what Tommaso Menoncello did.
Seb Atkinson, making his first Six Nations appearance at inside centre, was visibly out of sync with Fin Smith, but we have to accept that this was two players asked to build a partnership in real time against a side playing for history.
But the selection conversation cannot stop at the teamsheet. It has to extend to the policy that shapes it. Consider what Borthwick could theoretically call upon if the RFU’s overseas player ban did not exist. Jack Willis, Top 14 Player of the Year, Champions Cup nominee, regularly captaining Toulouse, is one of the finest opensides in European rugby. David Ribbans, 10 caps, has extended his contract at Toulon until 2028 having made an immediate impact on one of France’s most ambitious clubs. Kyle Sinckler, 68 Test caps and a World Cup starter, plays alongside him. Lewis Ludlam, 25 caps, completes Toulon’s English contingent. Joe Marchant, first-choice outside centre for England at the 2023 World Cup, is at Stade Français. Tom Willis, squeezed from Borthwick’s plans even before departing, is heading for a glass of claret at Bordeaux. The combined cap count of England internationals currently playing Top 14 rugby and unavailable for selection is pushing toward 250.
These players did not leave to escape Borthwick. They left because English clubs could not match French salaries, or because their clubs collapsed beneath them. Courtney Lawes, one of the most respected voices in English rugby, said publicly that the policy means England are “hurting themselves”. The RFU’s response has been institutional silence. The policy is embedded in a commercial agreement with Premiership Rugby running until 2032, prioritising club revenue over national team performance.
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This is wage suppression dressed as principle. The perverse irony is that this policy may yet deliver Jack Willis into an Ireland shirt. His Northern Irish grandfather makes him eligible for Ireland once a three-year stand-down period expires in late 2026. The IRFU have no overseas ban and they can select him at Toulouse. England created this problem by their own commercial myopia. Nothing delivers more rugby interest than a winning Test team and England owns the consequences.
England cannot close
When England needed someone to take the game by the scruff in the final 20 minutes, to make a call, impose themselves, change the tempo, nobody did it. They sat on a lead they didn’t know how to protect, ceded territory, and waited for something to happen. Something did – Italy won.
This is a pattern. We know that the 52 to 68 minute window is where Test matches are won and lost, where fatigue meets the cruel mistress of preparation, where fitness collides with decision-making, where the team that has done the deeper work pulls away and the team running on fumes and process collapses.
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England have now lost that window in three successive matches. They dominated the kicking battle in Rome in the first half and controlled large swathes of the opening exchanges, then went missing precisely when the game demanded them to step up in desire and concentration. Scotland exposed it at Murrayfield. Ireland exposed it at Twickenham. Italy, at the Stadio Olimpico in front of a sold-out crowd desperate for history, simply did what the other two had done before them.
The solution is not complicated, even if the execution is hard. Close games require players who trust themselves, communicate instinctively, and lead from within the group rather than looking to the coaches’ box for the next instruction. It requires a captain who manages territory, emotional momentum, not just his own performance, a fly-half who controls tempo rather than just executes plays, and a bench that arrives to impose rather than maintain.
England have all of those players in theory. In practice, they look like men waiting to be told what to do.
When data becomes a cage
Borthwick is an outstanding technical analyst. His work on lineout structure, set-piece organisation, and defensive patterns has been genuinely excellent. But there is a growing body of evidence that his stats-based coaching philosophy is hollowing out the decision-making capacity of his players. In his post-Ireland press conference, Borthwick spoke carefully about reviewing “how I’ve set the team up over the last 18 months.” It is the language of a man auditing a system, not rebuilding a culture.
The problem with coaching through data is that you can make statistics argue almost any case you want. What you cannot do is bottle the instinct to make the right call in the 68th minute at the Stadio Olimpico when your centre partnership is struggling and the crowd is roaring. The best coaches, those who consistently produce teams that thrive under close out chaos, teach the principles behind the patterns so that players can adapt when the pattern breaks down. They trust players to read the game in real time and make decisions based on what they see, not what they’ve been told to do. A team that has been coached to look at data rather than trust themselves has had the decision-making coached out of them.
The solution requires a fundamental philosophical shift, and it requires it now, before Paris and certainly before the World Cup cycle intensifies. Emotional intelligence coaching, leadership coaching, the explicit development of players who make calls rather than follow them; these are not soft alternatives to technical rigour; they are what the technical rigour has to build toward but that needs to be owned and managed on pitch, not on a clipboard.
Dial it back
At some point during this Six Nations, someone in the England communications operation decided that the best response to consecutive defeats was content. Reels. Flexes. Behind-the-scenes footage of players who had just been outplayed at Murrayfield looking enigmatic in hotel corridors. Banter posts.
Here is the thing about sporting social media engagement: it is a downstream consequence of winning, not a substitute for it. The accounts that generate genuine, sustained engagement; the All Blacks, South Africa, Ireland at their peak do so because the on-field product is exceptional and the content reflects something real. They focus firstly on rugby, skills, emotion of the shirt, not coffee chats and ‘bants’. Engagement built on manufactured swagger whilst losing three Test matches in a row is not a communications strategy – it alienates people of a critical mode and is a distraction dressed by media fluffies as ‘building the brand’.
England’s social media operation has confused being loud with having something to say. The only post that will meaningfully move the dial is a scoreboard with a win on it. Everything else is noise, and right now, England are producing a lot of noise.
The Sunday morning WhatsApp
There is a difference between supporting a head coach and performing support for one. Sweeney’s statement, distributed via WhatsApp to the RFU communications group on a Sunday morning, before the Rome dust had settled, before any serious post-mortem had been conducted, was an institution doing what institutions do when they sense the walls closing in: getting in front of the narrative rather than confronting it.
The RFU has a long and well-documented history of conflating loyalty with standards. Backing Borthwick publicly is defensible. Backing him reflexively, before any honest reckoning has taken place, is something else entirely.
It is the organisation holding a mirror up to itself, and then turning it to face the wall.
France is a free hit
Paris next Saturday. A trip to the Stade de France to face a side that, despite losing to Scotland, remain the most dangerous attacking team in the Northern Hemisphere. England’s worst-ever Six Nations finish is now a live possibility.
And yet, it’s a free hit; one that, properly understood, is liberating. There is no pressure because expectation has already been buried in Rome. The only question is whether England have the courage to use it.
The tactical prescription writes itself and is less than rocket science. Target the French scrum; it has shown vulnerability in this tournament and England’s set-piece is the one area of genuine competitive advantage. Play high possession rugby and keep the ball away from Louis Bielle-Biarrey and Thomas Ramos because giving France space is handing them a loaded machine gun with which to open fire, not a game plan. Pick big, physical carriers to take the weight off Ben Earl, who has been carrying this pack largely alone. Chandler Cunningham-South may not be suited to eight as his hands are not test standard, but there’s little doubt at six his physicality certainly is. Keep faith in a couple of the youngsters that failed in Rome but were picked on promise. Rest Itoje; Paris under the microscope, with a hostile crowd and a point to prove, is not the environment in which to rebuild an England captain’s authority.
But Sweeney’s statement contains one sentence that deserves to be read twice. England fans, he says, “rightly expect a team that learns and grows through adversity.” They do. The question is whether this coaching staff, this structure, and this philosophy can deliver it, or whether the RFU’s full support for Borthwick is merely the opening act of a rather different story.
Sir Humphrey Appleby would recognise the script.
READ MORE: RFU make position on Steve Borthwick future clear after Italy defeat
