England warmed up for the RBS Six Nations Championship game against Scotland at Twickenham on Saturday with a training session yesterday so intense that Stuart Lancaster, the head coach, had to calm it down.
The ferocity of such a session can only be good for a frustrated group of players who know that they were below their best against Ireland 11 days ago. Lancaster said yesterday that he was confident his players were not peaking too soon. Yet he did watch training yesterday with that thought in mind. “I had to make sure that they weren’t playing the game too early,” he said.
Lancaster confirmed yesterday that Courtney Lawes would return to the starting XV, along with Mike Brown, the Harlequins full back, who missed the Ireland game because of concussion. England would be hard pushed to find two tougher personalities. Geoff Parling will return to the bench along with Tom Wood.
So on the training paddock yesterday, there was a proper 15 versus 15 with JP Doyle, the international referee, blowing the whistle. With Sam Burgess in camp for two days, he ran at outside centre for what was effectively a B-team who, according to Lancaster, “had a point to prove”. “The boys were certainly up for it which is just what you want going into a game like this,” Lawes said. “You need to be on edge.”
All of which is fine but, as Lancaster said, it counts for nothing if it cannot be replicated at the weekend. Countless England teams in the past have trained with rare beauty in midweek and were then unrecognisably ugly on the following Saturday.
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The build-up to the Ireland game was, by all accounts, as immaculate as they come. The execution in Dublin failed utterly to reflect that. England, on Saturday against Scotland, need to look like the raging team who trained with such intensity yesterday.
England (v Scotland, Twickenham, Saturday 5pm): M Brown(Harlequins); A Watson (Bath), J Joseph (Bath), L Burrell (Northampton Saints), J Nowell (Exeter Chiefs); G Ford (Bath), B Youngs (Leicester Tigers); J Marler (Harlequins), D Hartley (Northampton Saints), D Cole (Leicester Tigers), C Lawes (Northampton Saints), D Attwood (Bath), J Haskell (Wasps), C Robshaw (Harlequins, captain), B Vunipola (Saracens). Replacements: T Youngs (Leicester Tigers), M Vunipola (Saracens), K Brookes (Newcastle Falcons), G Parling (Leicester Tigers), T Wood (Northampton Saints), R Wigglesworth (Saracens), D Cipriani (Sale Sharks), B Twelvetrees (Gloucester).