this.
The more things change the more they stay the same. How many times under previous management have the English rugby side said they’ll learn lessons from blowing it?
Mauricio Pochettino said recently that he knows how Spurs will play in the first few seconds of a game. It’s exactly the same as the England rugby team.
As soon as they were so sloppy from the off you knew the Grand Slam was gone. Yeah they’d started like this in every other game of the Six Nations bar Scotland and got away with it but you just knew, with the Slam and the 19 game unbeaten world record on the line, you just knew.
But we’ll take lessons from this.
The mantra that has followed every blown chance since Woodward’s days. But will they, will they really? They hadn’t learned anything from the previous games, can’t they learn from scraping victories?
Will they learn that England’s only period of control in the whole game was when Youngs and Ford were off the pitch?
Well it doesn’t look like they learned at the time as when Te’o went off injured back came Ford and back came the useless England.
Care brought speed to proceedings. I though Youngs had cracked it in the Autumn but no, he’s pretty much been back to his dull, dithering self this tournament. Make excuses about lack of help from the pack but that’s got nothing to do with the amount of time he takes to get to the breakdown. The mark against Care is his kicking, well you’d think Youngs would be good at that to get the nod. Well, he’s good at kicking the ball away and gifting nice easy possession to the opposition.
Against the Jocks he found touch with box kicks,against Ireland he found nice waiting green shirted arms.
And then there’s Ford. OK when everything is going right. Anonymous when it ain’t. With the need for someone to cover his back due to his flouncy tackling, he’s an obvious target for better teams. A weak link.
It’s not like this Irish side are that great. Hard to beat at home but almost one dimensional, they after all could only beat an inept England by four points.
Title celebrations were odd but they had won it so should have celebrated but stupid not to hand it to them last week, when they won it, won the game and were in front of their own fans. Typical bureaucracy.
But Jones is quite right, England are no where near being good enough to win the World Cup, will he have learned the lessons to make them…