Steve Borthwick’s World Cup review process has not officially begun, although the England head coach is leaving France with notebooks filled with thoughts from the past eight weeks. As he flicks through the pages, a few themes will emerge.
England winning the bronze medal was a positive return, aided by a generous draw, from a project that was launched in June. Borthwick, the head coach, will not allow himself to believe that England are actually the third-best team in the world. Crucially, nobody at Twickenham can either.
Some plans are already being formulated, which include targeting the inner-cities for a new generation of players, as France have done in the banlieues of Paris, and making radical changes to the academy system.
The first positive theme to emerge from Borthwick’s scribbles will be the fight and togetherness that he instilled in a squad that was disjointed and dysfunctional when he took over at the turn of the year. There will have been frustrated individuals in France — Henry Arundell, Jack Walker and Max Malins, to name a few, given their lack of action — but Borthwick had the England squad united and playing for one another.
England made very little impression in attack but their plan was to be disciplined and hard to beat. In that, they succeeded. It carried them to six victories in their seven games and to the brink of defeating South Africa in the semi-finals. It was a limited approach that worked for this project but it tended to make England play to the level of their opponents.
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The next challenge is to be more than simply hard to beat and add layers in attack. This is not a new issue — it was the situation that Eddie Jones left the team in after failing with his attempt to impose the fluid attacking system he called “New England”.
Felix Jones, who has now won two World Cups as South Africa’s attack coach, will join England before the Six Nations to work in concert with Richard Wigglesworth. How England seek to evolve their attacking game will be fascinating. Does it mean a future for Marcus Smith at full back? His pace and skillset make him an attacking threat but, at 5ft 9in, he is a target for high balls and galloping runners. Smith is brave but he was run over multiple times by Fiji and Argentina.
Owen Farrell is 32 and George Ford is 30. They have run England for the best part of a decade and have plenty of rugby left in their legs and their brains. Does Borthwick build his new team around those two experienced playmakers? If he does, Smith’s wait to establish himself as England’s fly half will have to continue and his best route into the team will be at full back. Then it comes down to philosophy: Smith or Freddie Steward?
“I think we know the attack needs to evolve,” Jamie George, the hooker, said. “We’ve shown in parts that we can cause teams some difficulty. It’s going to be a focus point going forward, while also making sure that our defence and set piece in particular keep building.”
The second theme in Borthwick’s notepad to give him encouragement is the age profile of the squad. Ben Youngs, Courtney Lawes and Jonny May have confirmed their retirements from Test rugby, while Joe Marler, Dan Cole and a few others may not be far behind.
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Yet Borthwick highlighted how England had seven players aged 25 or under in their semi-final squad, more than any of the other three teams. That number includes Tom Curry, who already has 50 caps, and Ben Earl, England’s best player of this World Cup. George Martin, Ollie Chessum and Ollie Lawrence are also part of this group, with all three making their presence felt in France.
The loss of Joe Marchant, however, will be galling, given that the new Stade Français outside centre made the position his own during this World Cup. He chose to leave England after being discarded by Jones and when the financial pinch in the Premiership was so acute that Harlequins could pay him only half what was on offer in the Top 14. And so England, through past mismanagement of differing sorts, lose a guaranteed midfield starter for the next three years. Jack Willis and David Ribbans will also be playing in France and unavailable.
The third theme in Borthwick’s notebook is troublesome and an area that must dominate the minds of all at Twickenham in the coming months and years: how to build greater depth in the squad, and in crucial positions. The destruction of the RFU’s pathway back in 2018, coupled with the financial crisis in the league, is starting to bite.
“As I look forward, there’s a number of exciting young players. We know that the distribution positionally of those players isn’t necessarily even,” Borthwick said. “We know there are some areas where we’re a bit thinner than others. I need to make sure we’re doing some work and finding some depth in those key positions. That’s going to be part of my project over the next period of time along with my coaches.”
Those key positions would be front row and inside centre, in particular. England are light on hookers. George repeatedly had to play 80 minutes at this World Cup because Theo Dan, his 22-year-old deputy, is still no more than a prospect with a bright future.
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The prop stocks are low, too, not helped by shrinking squad sizes in the Gallagher Premiership leading to clubs retaining players who might otherwise have gone out on loan. England have begun work on this, recently holding their first position-specific tight-five training camp for promising youngsters.
The pathway is the responsibility of Conor O’Shea, the RFU’s director of rugby. There is talk of sending an England A team on tour and reviving something similar to the old Churchill Cup format. The way France have promoted the development of youth into the Top 14 is also seen as a blueprint for England.
“It’s in all of our interests to have a successful international team and it’s in all of our interests to have better-quality club players,” Bill Sweeney, the RFU chief executive, said. “You’ve seen that in France. There was an article in January 2017 when Bayonne went bust, Biarritz went bust, and there was a merger between Racing 92 and Stade Français on the table. Attendances were down, broadcast figures were down and I think the headline was something like, ‘Why can’t we do what the Premiership have done?’
“They have built their success since then on that crop of young players, like Antoine Dupont, who have come through. They have carefully nurtured those players through and they’ve been winning under-20s matches.
“Conor is coming over here to chat about what they have done in Paris — how they have tapped into a completely different athlete pool in an urban centre. We’ve been talking about that for a long time but we haven’t done it. We need to do things like that to broaden the skill base.
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“A lot of our young players just aren’t getting the right amount of game time. We’ve got some great talent coming through. If you look at our under-18s and under-19s’ results this year, we beat France 41-0, we beat Wales 60-14 and we beat Ireland 56-14. But what happens to those players now?
“I went to the France-England under-20s match last season and they had 102 starting appearances for Top 14 clubs and we had eight — and of the eight, [Chandler] Cunningham-South was six of them.”
The extent to which pathways improve will be a significant indicator of the success of the new Professional Game Partnership (PGP) being negotiated between the RFU and Premiership Rugby. The clubs will absolutely not stand for interference from England when it comes to selection. The players are contracted by the clubs and that will remain the case even with the introduction of these proposed “enhanced” deals that give Borthwick some control over fitness and skill development.
A player draft has been mooted, allowing clubs to select players from the academy system to fill gaps in their squad. That is unlikely to happen but the RFU is on board with a more flexible system, as the Bristol Bears director of rugby, Pat Lam, has long argued for, that allows academy players to move to a club where they will play without a prohibitive price tag.
“That is one of the things we are having conversations with PRL [Premiership Rugby Limited] about,” Sweeney said. “If you have one club with an abundance of hookers, for example, and other clubs who don’t, we have to look at how we can move them around so we get real positional strength in depth. It is tricky, but I think we will be able to achieve that.”
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Borthwick and his coaches will work through their notebooks over the next fortnight before meeting to review the World Cup. The official RFU process will be concluded before the end of the year. Sweeney will once again draft in an anonymous panel of advisers; despite it being a system that failed England for three years.
The panel repeatedly endorsed Jones and signed off assurances of progress as the performances of the national team continued to slide into a hole, out of which Borthwick is now trying to lift England. The system is due to change under the PGP but for now it remains in place.
Not that it was necessary, but Sweeney endorsed Borthwick as the long-term England coach. England still need to work on how to engage better with supporters. Playing dreadful rugby while working on fitness to deliver a couple of proud performances at the end of the year is not going to cut it again.
“Winning matters,” Sweeney said. “If you’re winning matches it’s easier to forge that bond. We said coming into this tournament that we wanted to really connect with the fans again and that’s clearly high on Steve’s radar as well. We’ll look at any and all ways we can to do that.”
Sweeney has no plans to move England Tests away from Twickenham and cutting ticket prices is also not on the agenda because of the need to keep funding the professional game. “You’ll want us, rightly, to continue to invest in the women’s game and in player welfare. We’ve got Premiership clubs who need a period of stability. That’s going to take some support,” he said.
“We want to launch Premiership 2 [a rebranded second tier] in 2025-26. All these things take money and we’ve got a finite amount of resources. Significantly cutting Twickenham ticket prices would be difficult for us.”
Critics of the RFU in the grassroots game would argue that Twickenham is over-staffed, with more than 600 employees, while the loss of boots-on-the-ground community coaches who were made redundant during the pandemic is still being felt. Increasing participation levels — or at least levelling out the falling numbers — has to be a priority. That falls to the RFU, not Borthwick, but the two are connected. A winning England team is the best advert for the game.
