By Mitch Phillips
PARIS (Reuters) – From where they were at the end of their dismal warm-ups, England’s World Cup was an unqualified success and they were within three minutes of one of the great sporting turnarounds. But they leave France still very much a work in progress.
They arrived amid the gloom of five defeats in six games but finished on a high with six wins out of seven.
The skewed nature of the draw obviously favoured them, and reaching the semi-finals looked possible and even probable regardless of their form based on their World Cup history and the quality of players in the squad.
However, it is perhaps easy to forget that Argentina were ranked two places above England when they met in their opening game in Marseille so, after having Tom Curry sent off in the third minute, to totally dominate with a kicking masterclass from George Ford to win 27-10 was an impressive achievement.
It lifted the whole mood and, though they played a very cautious game for an hour in their next match against Japan, they then cut loose to win 34-12.
The 71-0 thrashing of Chile with a largely shadow team was notable only for the record-equalling five tries of Henry Arundell and the confirmation that Marcus Smith was a dangerous option at fullback.
Already assured of top spot in their group, England laboured against Samoa before snatching a late victory. They then played very well to build a 24-10 lead against Fiji in the quarter-finals and, after two quick-fire tries levelled the scores, calmly reclaimed the advantage and the victory via Owen Farrell’s boot.
In the semi-final, with a gameplan perfected for the wet conditions and the opposition, England had South Africa on the ropes for much of the game with a brilliant combination of tactical kicking and ferocious defence. Leading 15-6 with 11 minutes to go and with a scrum put-in on the Springbok 22, it is still hard to understand how they lost.
The post-mortem of the 16-15 defeat showed an alarming turnaround in the scrum, where South Africa won four penalties after veterans Dan Cole and Joe Marler went off, and finding props who can scrum strongly as well as carry will be top of coach Steve Borthwick’s to-do list.
England did not remotely threaten to score a try in that semi-final but when they delivered a rapier move to send their player of the tournament Ben Earls over early in the bronze final against Argentina, desperate supporters were thinking “Finally, here we go.”
It proved a false dawn as their only other score was via a chargedown as they battled to a 26-23 victory.
The big question is whether Borthwick desperately wants to address that issue or is happy to finesse his current kick-based policy. It seems unlikely that the latter will be good enough to mount a serious challenge to the game’s current top four and, though their spirited semi-final effort won admiration at home, many more games where they kick away 93% of their possession will see the demand for expensive Twickenham tickets quickly disappear.
Borthwick has spent the tournament reminding everyone that he hasn’t had long to rebuild the team Eddie Jones left in some disarray, but he has been in charge since December and had most of his squad in camp before and during the World Cup for an astonishing 20 weeks.
“I always believed we would be right… We were clear that the World Cup isn’t played in August,” he said after clinching third place.
Hooker Theo Dan, scorer of the second try on Friday after the first chargedown of his career, will be a key part of the next generation and echoed his coach’s view. “When everyone was writing us off, and probably rightly so with our performances before, we were quietly confident we had the ability to get it right,” he said.
“Things clicked when we got out here, we got some wins going, but unfortunately had the heartbreak of the last minute last week.”
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Hugh Lawson)
