“I’m in good shape, I’m sharp and I feel like I can outbox Mike Tyson,” Donnie Long, lost by KO, in the 1st. “I plan to get right in his game. Tyson is vulnerable, he makes lots of mistakes, I can hurt him,” Lorenzo Boyd, lost by KO in the 2nd. “I plan on using my experience to keep Tyson at bay,” Jesse Ferguson, lost by TKO in the 6th. “I forgot about more than Tyson knows. He’s got to go to school, he hasn’t faced a real fighter like me,” Pinklon Thomas, lost by TKO in the 6th. “I see myself knocking Mike Tyson out spectacularly,” Frank Bruno, lost by TKO in the 5th.
Or, as Tyson put it, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Steve Borthwick’s sounds promising. At Twickenham on Monday he talked simply and well about what he thinks has gone wrong with England and how to fix it. Given how little time he has he said wants to concentrate on trying to coach improvements in two or three key areas. He wasn’t about to lay out what they were, except to say that his priority will be strengthening the set piece and making sure they’re “brilliant at the basics” of the game. Beyond that, Borthwick spoke with unabashed passion about how much he loves English rugby and how he wants his side to be able to inspire that same pride in everyone else.
It was a convincing pitch. He is meticulous but uncomplicated, honest but uncompromising. The only problem is that it hasn’t been tested yet. It’s easy to sound good on the first day in the job, the worrying thing for Borthwick is that he has only 45 more before England play Scotland at Twickenham. That’s not his fault. He was supposed to start after the World Cup and had already spoken to Eddie Jones about how to manage that transition. Then the RFU brought it forward.
This Six Nations is going to be a pitiless introduction to Test rugby. After Scotland, England play Italy, then Wales, who will at the very least be harder to beat now they are back under Warren Gatland. After that it’s France, who are on a 13-match winning streak, then Ireland, who are top of the world rankings.
Borthwick has got six weeks or so and then he’s going up against coaches who are three years in to a four-year plan that is clearly working for them. England lost three matches in this year’s Six Nations and three the year before. There is an assumption they ought to be better than that, but not a whole lot of evidence why that is necessarily the case.
Borthwick says he is ready for the pressure he will be under if they finish in a similar position in next year’s championship. “In the last 22 years I’ve been involved in international rugby as a player or an assistant coach for 17 of them,” he said, “so the simple answer to that, is yes.” But he’s not. He can’t be until he’s lived through it.
No wonder then that having just explained they had sacked Jones because the results were not as good as they wanted, the RFU chief executive, Bill Sweeney, seemed reluctant to set Borthwick any performance targets. “We see this as a really exciting new age for England rugby,” Sweeney said when the question was put to him. “We think this is a new chapter. What we’re not going to do is say first thing, ‘by the way here’s a target for the 2023 World Cup’. This is a long-term rebuild.”
Nine months out from a World Cup they’ve been telling everyone to wait on for the last four years, the RFU suddenly seem keener to be judged on the one after it.
Pushed again as to whether he was confident Borthwick’s England will do better next year than they would have done otherwise, Sweeney stretched as far as saying he thought they would be “very competitive” in the World Cup. The draw means they ought to be. Make it through the group and England face a quarter-final against either Australia, who Jones had beaten 10 times out of 11, or Wales, who he had beaten eight times in the same number of games. You would have backed him to do it again, especially in a knockout match. After that are the semi-finals and Jones has never lost one of those.
The RFU have traded the hope that Borthwick’s England may do well for the expectation that Jones’s would because they were worried his team would not live up to it. Given the way England had been playing lately, perhaps they were right. But it still seems a strange bet to make nine months before the tournament, especially given they were going to bring Borthwick in once it was over. If they aren’t sure it has improved England’s chances of winning the thing, then what have they gained by making the change now except a better excuse for failing to do it?
Borthwick, at least, had another good answer about all this. “The competition right now at Tier 1 level is very, very, high,” he said. “Everyone wants an England team that wins, but we also want an England team that even when they don’t win still plays in a manner, and fights in a manner, and competes in a manner, where you can get behind them. A team that might not win every game, and might not win every contest, but where we can certainly be proud of what they’re doing. My job is to build that team.”
Again, it made him sound like a fine coach. So yes, there is hope. It’s going to be fascinating to see how far that carries them.
