At 8 o’clock on Wednesday night, Stuart Lancaster closed the door behind him on his three fellow coaches and stepped outside to ponder the enormity of his final decision. They had just completed the selection of his squad of 31 including, in its number, the player who has polarised opinion. His selection of Sam Burgess is the huge call upon which much of Lancaster’s World Cup campaign will be judged.
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” he said, responding to those — such as Brian O’Driscoll and Will Carling, two notables in a loud chorus — who have publicly questioned his faith in Burgess. The media was at it too in Australia yesterday, where one headline called the Burgess affair “an early Christmas present for the Wallabies”. Yet when Lancaster and his coaches weighed up one of their final decisions, Burgess or Luther Burrell — a man less than a year into his rugby union career, or a comparative veteran with two Six Nations campaigns behind him — they chose the new boy.
“What we know is what we see in camp, day in day out,” Lancaster said. “No one knows the players better than us.”
The coaches had to make a number of controversial decisions. On Wednesday night, they were still also debating whether Ben Morgan or Nick Easter should take the second slot at No 8 and many will feel that Easter was unlucky to get the cold shoulder.
Yet it is his midfield selections on which Lancaster has hung his reputation. Never, in his long and detailed plans for the home World Cup, would he have prescribed a situation where his four chosen centres would share just 36 caps between them. And furthermore, he always wanted a No 12 with a different kind of skill set to those of Burgess and Brad Barritt, a genuine expert in never-say-die defence, but no kicker or playmaker. It is almost by the by that his likely first-choice midfield pairing will be Barritt and Jonathan Joseph, who have never played together.
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Graphic: England World Cup squad
Nevertheless, this is where Lancaster has ended up and, in announcing his squad yesterday, patiently and at considerable length, he explained how and why his search had left him in a place that would be so disputatious. He has certainly left England fans with much to discuss.
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Was it a risk to have so little experience in midfield? “I wouldn’t say it’s a risk,” he said. “It’s exciting.” That it is. Concerning to many. There is an element of two-fingers-to-the-world in it.
It has come about because Burgess and Henry Slade, the young and gifted Exeter Chief, have made such late and convincing arguments for their selection. On Wednesday afternoon, in an intense 15-on-15 full-contact game, Lancaster had Burgess and Slade running together against Barritt and Burrell and the former pairing clearly made a decent impact.
Note here that Billy Twelvetrees, the Gloucester centre, did not even get on to a starting sheet of this trial game. Twelvetrees was the other centre to be given the bad news, although he must have seen it coming a couple of weeks off. “He’s a victim of Henry’s emergence,” Lancaster said.
In his explanation of Burgess’s inclusion, Lancaster praised his power, tackling and lines of running and insisted that he had as much pace as Burrell and Barritt. A try in the Wednesday game, Lancaster said, typified his ability. “When he ran the line he did, three good defenders stopped because they thought he was getting the ball and Alex Goode ran round the back and in for a try,” Lancaster said. “That threat at the line, and the ability to change the line, has put him in the picture.”
It is not just Burgess’s inclusion on which this squad will be judged. An army of Danny Cipriani fans are sustaining the wounds of his exclusion, especially after his dashing, tryscoring cameo off the bench against France in Paris on Saturday.
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Lancaster said that Cipriani had faced an uphill struggle to dislodge either George Ford or Owen Farrell from the No 10 berths, or Mike Brown or Goode from the No 15 positions. And, to charges that Cipriani had not had a fair crack at selection, Lancaster defended himself, saying that if you added Cipriani’s two appearances as a replacement together, he had as many game-time minutes as Brown or Goode. “I can reassure everyone 100 per cent that, in training, everybody has had an opportunity to put themselves forward,” he said.
On one subject he was not entirely — or not remotely — clear. Would Dylan Hartley, the hooker still serving a suspension, come in as the standby cover? That, Lancaster said, was “a hypothetical question” — and one that he would not answer. “I’m not going to spend my time thinking, ‘Could Dylan be here?’ ” he said. “The reality is he can’t be. He’s banned.”
Reading between the lines, a return for Hartley remains very possible, but having just explained to Luke Cowan-Dickie, the Exeter hooker, that he had not made the squad of 31, it was probably none too easy for Lancaster publicly to say so. Indeed, nothing was too easy for Lancaster yesterday. The announcement of a World Cup squad is a drum-roll kind of occasion, especially for the home team, and while the England coach is naturally proud of his squad and clearly has faith in them, it is probably a relief that the long wait is over for him to declare a hand top-heavy with controversial decisions.
On Monday, they will be back at Pennyhill Park, concentrating on the game ahead and it will all feel more business as usual. Of course, that is when it really counts; that is when the big decisions that Lancaster has made must pay off.
England’s fixtures
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Sept 18: Fiji (8pm, Twickenham).
Sept 26: Wales (8pm, Twickenham).
Oct 3: Australia (8pm, Twickenham).
Oct 10: Uruguay (8pm, Manchester City Stadium).
Quarter-finals: Oct 17: winner pool B v runner-up pool A (Twickenham); winner pool C v runner-up pool D (Millennium Stadium). Oct 18: winner pool D v runner-up pool C (Millennium Stadium); winner pool A v runner-up pool B (Twickenham).
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Semi-finals: Oct 24-25 (both at Twickenham). Third-place play-off: Oct 30 (Olympic Stadium, London).
Final: Oct 31 (Twickenham).