Not a great team, not a great campaign. All the same, it was England’s most important achievement in rugby since 2003. Pause for applause. Special bows from Stuart Lancaster and Chris Robshaw.
You think coming second is not great? It is when you start from where England did. They entered the Six Nations tournament as a morally bankrupt laughing stock, they left it as a thoroughly decent side. Decent in every possible way. It’s nothing less than a triumph.
Not one to be satisfied with. Of course not. England’s financial clout and their resources in terms of players should make them the Brazil of international rugby. Any performance at a lesser level must be questioned and criticised. But still, to come second after what went on six months ago is a stupendous achievement. And let the back-slapping stop right there.
In 1999 the England Test team lost to New Zealand at the Oval and the cricketers were booed on the balcony. They were the nation’s stock joke. There seemed no way of stopping the closed-feedback system in which failure breeds failure breeds failure.
Only a fool played for anything other than himself.
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The next year England beat West Indies at home and Pakistan away; you may recall the win in the dark in Karachi. England remembered how to compete, remembered how to win, remembered what sport was all about. It was a turnaround built on a tripod: a calm, thoughtful coach in Duncan Fletcher, a volcanic captain in Nasser Hussain and a governing body prepared to do everything necessary to make the England team as good as they could be. Since then England have won three Ashes series, one of them in Australia, and become the world’s leading Test nation.
So there’s a lesson for the rugby boys. These brief but promising few weeks of resurgence have been strictly twolegged: Lancaster and Robshaw took on a difficult situation and excelled. It began with scrappy matches against Scotland and Italy; Italy would have won if they’d had a goal-kicker. But England went up a level or two as they lost narrowly to Wales, beat France in Paris and then marmalised Ireland at Twickenham on Saturday.
Consider where they came from. England’s performance at the World Cup six months ago was dreadful in every possible way. They played appalling rugby and gave an appalling account of themselves. When you defend a man against a charge of lying by explaining that he was merely too drunk to remember anything, you are not staking a claim to the moral high ground.
Senior players responded to trust by abusing it. The leaked post-World Cup report, exclusively revealed in these pages, showed a group of players who had abdicated personal responsibility and blamed everybody else for their failings instead.
The report revealed an almost obscene sense of entitlement. Behind it you could hear the clash of old and new cultures: the last ghosts of amateurism banging their heads against the new — to them — demands of professional sport.
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I liked the idea of Stuart Lancaster the moment I read that he had cancelled the players’ warm-weather training trip to the Algarve and taken them to Yorkshire instead. That was a cultural revolution in a single decision, an all-out war on entitlement. Then he made Robshaw captain instead of some old-school cult figure: a man untarnished by New Zealand and the England dressing room.
A caretaker manager is supposed to mind the shop, to carry on like the previous bloke. Lancaster interpreted his mandate differently, got rid of a lot of old favourites and brought in the new. It has given us writers the long-forgotten pleasure of having to say nice things about England rugby. Not too nice, of course, because second place is not the summit. But Lancaster’s England have made a journey from despair to hope, and that’s the greatest journey any human being can be expected to make.
Lancaster’s reward will probably be the sack.
And that may even be the right decision. He has overseen this interim period and done so splendidly. Now the RFU must decide whether to choose Lancaster, whose uncomplicated, almost naive vision has been exactly the tonic England needed, or the seen-it-all, won-it-all Nick Mallett.
Well, you don’t appoint someone to high office as a reward for what he’s already done, you appoint him because you think he’ll do a better job than anyone else. Lancaster is unproven. A campaign of five matches and a cultural revolution doesn’t mean that he is the man for long-term strategy and the World Cup of 2015.
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Mallett is proven all right, but that doesn’t mean he can do it again. Leadership is a fast-diminishing asset. Mallett may have already given the best of himself. He didn’t manage that much magic when he ran Italy.
In other words, they’re both gambles. Mallett may have run out of what’s needed for the prolonged leadership of an international rugby team, Lancaster may never have had it. You don’t know until you put them in charge. They make a pleasingly antithetical pair; chosing one rather than the other probably reveals all sorts of things about the kind of person you are.
Well, then, what kind of person is the RFU? Grotesque and dysfunctional, last time I looked. Obsessed by faction, self-interest and parochialism, and always prepared to hang a good man out to dry, as they did with Martin Johnson. It has a new chief executive, Ian Ritchie; if he can do for his organisation what Lancaster has done for the team, he’ll be doing all right.
It matters which man it chooses, of course it does. But more than anything else, what matters is that the RFU backs him. Backs the man, backs the team. It must embrace the notion that everything good in English rugby starts with a strong, morally coherent England team. Another kind of cultural revolution is needed.