IF YOU start changing horses in mid-stream, it induces the uncomfortable feeling that you may not have made the right selection in the first place. The reasons must be particularly strong and, after two weekends of the RBS Six Nations Championship, Andy Robinson may still feel that his stuttering England side is capable of springing a surprise.
The head coach has not lacked advice nor criticism: should he play Charlie Hodgson in the critical position of fly half against Ireland tomorrow week but remove the responsibility of goalkicking from him, and would it make a difference if he did? Goalkicking, after all, is part of who Hodgson is as a player and could Olly Barkley, the obvious alternative, ensure a higher strike rate anyway?
Having added Andy Goode to the training squad, Robinson must also be giving consideration to the uncapped Leicester fly half, who will be in action this afternoon in his club’s Zurich Premiership encounter with Newcastle Falcons at Welford Road. But the really intriguing encounter in that game comes between the rival outside centres, Ollie Smith and Mathew Tait, who have yet to confirm a place in Robinson’s affections.
All his public utterances of the past few weeks suggest that Smith believes he should have been wearing the England No 13 jersey in the Six Nations; his display in the A international with France confirmed that belief, his lines of running, his timing of the pass, his tackling. “We didn’t have time, as coaching staff, to complicate things,” Brian Ashton, the England A coach, said wryly but Smith — aided by the fact that Goode was at fly half — struck up an intuitive understanding with Chris Bell, the Leeds Tykes centre.
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But it was Tait, on the eve of his 19th birthday, who was England’s outside centre against Wales and was then shunted aside in favour of his Newcastle colleague, Jamie Noon. That decision brought down Rob Andrew’s wrath on Robinson, the Newcastle director of rugby accusing him of poor man-management; it would have been better, Andrew said, for Tait to have been introduced from the bench, as was the case with Jonny Wilkinson and Jason Robinson when they were finding their feet on rugby union’s international stage.
Today, though, may show how much mental resilience Tait possesses. The image the public now has, Andrew said, is of Tait being picked up and dumped by Gavin Henson, the Wales centre, rather than rounding Robinson to score in the Zurich Premiership game between Newcastle and Sale Sharks. The England management, he alleges, created that negative image and now Newcastle have to pick up the pieces.
Wilkinson himself did not enjoy the best of introductions by England since his first international start, aged 19, was the 76-0 defeat by Australia in Brisbane in 1998. During that game he missed England’s only two penalty attempts — one from no more than 18 metres — and had a kick charged down that led to an Australian try. He was injured in the next game, against New Zealand, and may have returned to the North East with a fair amount of mental as well as physical damage.
He has bounced back pretty well, all things considered, and Tait may do so too. Andrew’s concern is completely understandable but professional sport is a hard school and Tait, an intelligent youngster, now knows how hard. That Wales game is there as a reference point in his memory bank but it should not prey on his mind; indeed, he can be pleased that he has already achieved so much in so short a time and his return this weekend to the banter of his Newcastle colleagues will have set his feet on solid ground once more.
He will just be pleased to see action this afternoon alongside so experienced an individual as Mark Mayerhofler while Noon, who has been anticipating all week the arrival of his first child, is rested. Noon, as it happens, performed well in that contentious outside-centre jersey for England against France and it may be that, whatever Smith and Tait achieve today, they will remain in the queue behind him.
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Northampton, the bottom club in the Premiership, were buoyed yesterday by the decision of Bruce Reihana to stay with them for a further three years. Reihana, full back against London Wasps tomorrow, had decided to return to New Zealand at the end of this season and had agreed a contract with the New Zealand Rugby Football Union but, for family reasons, he has changed his mind.