The England players filtering back to their clubs after their first interactions with Steve Borthwick and Kevin Sinfield have been resoundingly positive about the experience. “Collectively, very inspired,” was how one source described the squad’s reaction to the vision that was laid out during the fitness testing camps at the start of this week. “The players are really enthused about the rugby focus.”
Do not, therefore, expect too many more photographs of players on rafts or canoeing down rivers. Borthwick has scrapped England’s pre-Six Nations camp in Portugal and will have the team based at their Surrey training headquarters to maximise the time available for rugby before the Six Nations.
With 18 days until he can start working with his players on the field, the question is what England’s rugby will look like under Borthwick. How does he intend to maximise the potential of a team that finished 2022 with a losing record?
There will be clarity and detail — the hallmarks of Borthwick’s coaching — but the answer will not be to transplant the territorial kick-pressure game plan that brought title-winning success with Leicester Tigers.
Borthwick knows that. “You’ve got to play a game of rugby that suits the players you have,” he said. There were new faces and recalls this week, including George Ford, Ben Earl, Tom Pearson, Fraser Dingwall and Ollie Hassell-Collins, indicating England will move in a different direction. To that end, the most important coaching appointment is still to be confirmed.
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England will have a more streamlined management team than under Eddie Jones, with Matt Proudfoot, who was scrum coach, and Danny Kerry, the coaching co-ordinator, having been dismissed. Borthwick will be up his ladder, coaching the forwards alongside Richard Cockerill, having made it a priority to fix England’s set-piece woes. Sinfield will be trusted with building a suffocating, spirited, physical defence. Appointing the right attack coach is the final piece of the jigsaw.
Martin Gleeson is England’s incumbent in the role and he was present at the camps in Liverpool and Gloucester this week. However, his future remains uncertain. Although popular with the players, the indications are that the former rugby league international was given very little creative freedom under Jones. England’s attacking statistics, like their set piece, were woeful in 2022.
Gleeson may well be retained, at least for the Six Nations given the players come into camp in less than three weeks, but Borthwick’s mission is to appoint the best available coaches in each role before the World Cup. That would not yet include Richard Wigglesworth, who has been linked with an England position. The 39-year-old forged an effective relationship with Borthwick and Sinfield at Leicester and has taken interim charge, but he retired from playing only last week and is expected to remain at the club to further his coaching education.
Wigglesworth would be the easy appointment and it would work if Borthwick wanted to create Leicester 2.0 — but he needs an attack coach who will challenge his thinking. Borthwick relies heavily on data to underpin his coaching and it drove the Leicester game plan.
With England he will need — and want — a creative spirit who sees the game differently, with proven experience of delivering. Gleeson, for all his qualities, does not have that track record.
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Borthwick has been looking at Sam Vesty at Northampton Saints and Nick Evans at Harlequins; that much was clear from talking to both clubs yesterday. Dan Biggar, the Wales fly half who left Northampton before Christmas, said that Vesty was the best attack coach in the Premiership. Only Saracens have scored more points and more tries than Saints this season.
“We’ve had some good conversations about it. If they [England] weren’t looking at him, I’d be surprised,” Phil Dowson, the Northampton director of rugby, said of Vesty.
“He is doing some really good stuff but it all depends on what Steve Borthwick wants from his attacking group, how he’s going to put that together.”
Evans, meanwhile, has mentored Marcus Smith at Harlequins and has been the creative brain behind some of the Premiership’s best attacking, instinctive rugby in recent years; a contrast to the Leicester way, but a style that was still based on a dominant set piece and winning turnovers at the breakdown.
Tabai Matson, the senior coach at Harlequins, is convinced that Evans has the quality to bring his attacking ideas to the international level. “He is exceptional. If there is a chat about him being in line for that level, you would anticipate on the way that our team plays that someone will have looked at him,” he said.
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Whether Evans or Vesty, Borthwick’s challenge would then be to forge a united approach that married his vision with that of Sinfield and the attack coach; not least because those periods of transition in the game are the most profitable.
“What worked really well at Leicester was how close myself and Wiggy were,” Sinfield said. “We understood how important the transitions were. I want to build the same relationship with our attack coach here.
“Within that alignment it’s going to be really important how we play. I played in a position where it was my job to ensure we scored points. So I understand how important it is that not only are we good defensively but we score points and we are a threat.”
Expect England to base their game plan around set piece and defence initially, but the attack coach will be operating in an environment where the players will be encouraged to be themselves. That appears to be one of the lessons that Borthwick and Sinfield have learnt from talking to the squad. “We’ll make sure the players believe in what they’re doing,” Sinfield said. That will be music to the ears of Smith as a playmaker who has not found his attacking rhythm in an England jersey.
The appointment of Evans would boost Smith’s prospects of starting but Ford, trusted by Borthwick, is back in the mix and Owen Farrell will remain a dominant force in the England back line, whether at fly half or, more likely, retained at inside centre given the quality of alternatives at No 10.
