England’s style over next three years could be dictated by end of club season
Not many of Eddie Jones’s statements stand the test of time, which is little surprise given his penchant for making up anecdotes and statistics, but every so often the former England head coach was remarkably prescient.
Cast your mind back four years, if you dare, to the 2020 Autumn Nations Cup, which I would volunteer as the worst rugby tournament that I have covered. Against an already depressing backdrop of near empty stadiums because of the Covid pandemic, the rugby was somehow even more depressing. Defence was everything, attack was a dirty word. England players spoke openly about avoiding line breaks. George Ford referred to possession of the ball as a “ticking time bomb”.
Jones, however, was unfazed by the chorus of criticism over the quality of rugby in the tournament. “We go through cycles,” Jones said. “The game is cyclical. We go through attack and defence cycles. And that’s the beauty of our game – it doesn’t sit still. We go through these periods in the game. The next cycle is always an attacking one so let’s enjoy the defensive cycle we have at the moment and look forward to the attacking cycle when it comes.”
That cycle seemed to culminate in South Africa’s victory in last year’s World Cup in which defences and kicking dominated. That included England. Springboks assistant coach Felix Jones, since hired as England’s defence coach, provided a pithy summation of Steve Borthwick’s team during the Chasing the Sun documentary: “If I could sum up their soul in two words, it’s statistics – or ‘Moneyball’ – and kicking game. That’s it.”
Since then it feels like a new dawn has risen with England among the teams who have emerged blinking into this strange new light of attacking rugby, finishing their Six Nations campaign with seven tries against Ireland and France. As my colleague Charles Richardson noted not altogether approvingly last week, there has also been an explosion of tries in the Premiership this season.
Yet now we are at the business end of the season, we are entering a possible pivot point that could well determine England’s direction of travel for this next cycle.
For the first time in eight years, the Premiership has two fresh representatives other than Saracens and Exeter Chiefs in the Champions Cup semi-finals. Northampton Saints and Harlequins act as standard-bearers for the thrill-a-minute, edge-of-your-seat rugby as showcased last week at Twickenham. It should be stated that both sides have an under-rated set piece, but as prop Will Collier stated following Quins’ bonkers 42-41 quarter-final win over Bordeaux, they want to prove that ambition and adventure can win big games.
“I think it shows that if you have the foundations in place and you want to play rugby then anything is possible,” Collier said. “The Northamptons of this world and other teams who want to play rugby and want to go and score tries. We kick when appropriate but play when it is on. That’s the key. When it’s on, we go.”
Both face an onerous task in the home cities of Leinster and Toulouse, but victory for either would act as further vindication that their style can be successful on the biggest of stages.
This leads into the Premiership play-offs where Quins, Northampton, Bath and Bristol Bears can also strike a further blow for this new wave of thrillseekers.
And then there are Saracens. For much of the past decade, Saracens have acted like the Kardashians as the preeminent influencers upon English rugby in terms of personnel and philosophy. Two years ago, chastened by their defeat by Borthwick’s Leicester side in the 2022 Premiership final, Saracens’ players urged their coaches to change their philosophy from a side that wanted to stay in the fight to one that started landing blows of their own.
“Sarries were always very territory and defence focused and they won so many trophies that way,” Danny Care, the Harlequins scrum-half, said. “Then they went ‘we’re going to start attacking’ and everyone else followed suit. It changed the dial.”
But that dial seemed to change again last Friday night when Saracens downed Bath 15-12 in a performance that was less thrilling than compelling. Reprising pages from their old playbook, Saracens kicked a season high 48 times. Interestingly, figures from both camps independently referred to the game as “Test match” in terms of tactics and intensity, a fact that will not have been lost on Borthwick and his attack coach Richard Wigglesworth who were in the stands at the Rec.
Whether that was a one-off tactical masterclass, delivered by Owen Farrell to exploit Bath’s specific weaknesses, or a reversion to type remains to be seen.
The victory gave Saracens control of the race for a home semi-final – in which they have not lost a fixture for 11 years. Just as history is determined by the winners, so the teams clutching silverware at the end of the season tend to have an outsized influence on the direction of the national team.
Whether England head to Japan, now coached by Jones, and New Zealand this summer deploying moneyball and kicking or ambition and adventure may well be determined by the next few weeks.
