GIVEN the strength of his selection, Stuart Lancaster was never going to learn much he did not already know about the majority of the players he had awarded parts in England’s final World Cup audition.
The requirements, temperamental as much as physical and technical, of the global gathering over the regular routine of the Six Nations are proportionately greater. But this was a virtual first team, pitted against a French team not far off either. The coach’s choices had mostly been made. In one respect at least, Lancaster could beg some sympathy. The protracted debate about who and what England’s inside-centre should be — Luther Burrell last night, Sam Burgess a week earlier — predates Lancaster by more than a decade and four previous coaches or managers.
Burrell developed last season into a worthy incumbent. But the soft penalty he conceded inside two minutes counted against him, not just in its own right but because it was exactly the kind of avoidable offence that could eventually cost England the Webb Ellis trophy.
Much about the ponderous, disjointed way this well-endowed England side attempted to leave their draining training days behind them was calculated to trigger Lancaster’s ire, just as it did referee Jaco Peyper’s. Rusty, musclebound from all that hard labour? So, surely, were France.
With the forwards so misfiring, how could Burrell be expected to make any lasting impression? The Wallabies, the Welsh and even the Fijians saw a happy vision of what, with 26 days now remaining, has become the very short-term future until the dreaded Pool A is upon them. Dire dress rehearsal, fine first night? Lancaster can only hope so. This week it is down to him to make a properly calculated decision about Burgess, and other candidates, based not on reputation but evidence. If it were the former, he would not be the first to succumb.
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In turn Clive Woodward, Andy Robinson, Brian Ashton and Martin Johnson failed to solve the problem left once Will Greenwood’s exceptional career in the England XV came to a close in March 2004. Since 2012 it has been Lancaster’s turn.
Since Greenwood there have been 21 England inside-centres in these 11 years. None has started even 15 Tests in this pivotal position. In all these years the search for someone combining the ball-playing skills of a second fly-half and the raw power of a Burgess has proved fruitless.
Perhaps Burrell, with his size and skill-set, comes nearest to the ideal. Burgess is one but not the other. Henry Slade may lack brute force but he made such a persuasive case last Saturday that his threatened World Cup exclusion would be either perverse or misguided.
There are other selection issues still bothering the England coach, hooker being the main one since he ditched Dylan Hartley on disciplinary grounds. All it took to discount Luke Cowan-Dickie, and usher in Jamie George, was three dicky lineouts at Twickenham.
This centre thing is at least partly of Lancaster’s making, even if it might optimistically be seen as a problem of plenty. The coach’s cohort Mike Catt said six, or even seven if Owen Farrell were included as a centre contender, into four would not go. Catt happens to have been one of those used as a post-Greenwood inside-centre. He got to 10 caps there. His England coaching partner, Owen Farrell’s father Andy, had six. Brad Barritt, a World Cup certainty, is on 10 like Catt and could soon enough make it 11.
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But you can see how insoluble it has been when even Shontayne Hape had 13 selections – the nearest thing England had previously had to a Burgess, not least because Hape too emerged from rugby league. The difference was he was a New Zealander playing in England, Burgess an Englishman in Australia. At the top of this list, with a grand total of 14, lies Riki Flutey, another Kiwi exile for whom the flag of St George became a convenience. He was, though, a decent player and a Lion who fulfilled a coach’s desire by having a rugged air complemented by genuine legerdemain.
Flutey is joined on 14 by Billy Twelvetrees. And there is another of Lancaster’s problems, because Twelvetrees would personify everything Lancaster requires but for a self-destructive inconsistency that entails his impending omission from the World Cup squad. Twice in a week Twelvetrees has been sent on from the bench – a negative portent if ever there was one when Lancaster was looking at Slade and Burgess from the start last week and his Six Nations pairing of Burrell and Jonathan Joseph this time. Barritt, lately injured, outranks them all. Twelvetrees added 17 minutes as a replacement last night to the 14 given to him in the first French match. Without him, especially without Slade, and even with George Ford, would England have the creativity to exploit Joseph or Jonny May or Anthony Watson? The question then comes down to whether England can win their own World Cup, or even emerge from the pool, by playing merely muscular rugby. Maybe so: as England’s 2007 finalists remember, that was how South Africa won it then on this very ground.