The RFU's plan of 'it’ll be all right at the World Cup' is quickly unravelling with inexperienced players and coaches looking incapable of fixing the slide
Borthwick tends to steer clear of painting a big picture, as Jones loved to do, and instead pick on compartments of improvements or mishaps. “We got to the edge 14 or 15 times,” he said after last week’s 29-10 loss in Ireland. “We missed 27 tackles,” he said after the Fiji defeat.
The Flying Fijians certainly showed how to play with the ball in the hands, either moving it quickly to beat the man, or running over that man when necessary. At one point, Semi Radradra – whose performance put Manu Tuilagi in the shade – ploughed through the England wing Max Malins to raise cheers from the exultant Fiji supporters massed in Twickenham’s north-east corner. Malins, as a former club-mate of Radradra’s at Bristol, was left with a look mixing a grimace and a smile.
We can only imagine the thoughts of the RFU’s chief executive Bill Sweeney, because the man to whom Borthwick reports has not deigned to speak to the media since Borthwick’s appointment. But while an absence of cold steel in the RFU leadership, plus the dispiriting feeling of a mess within the Premiership, can be pointed to, it won’t help Borthwick in the next few weeks.
Borthwick insists his squad is tight, but here is another fundamental question – there are tight squads who have laughs around the dartboard, and don’t get called out during match reviews, and share rooms with players from other clubs; but then there are maybe less tight squads whose strength is the ability to call each other out, amid a collective trust that the calling-out is justified, and the man doing the calling knows his stuff.
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