the clamour for the England head coach to pick the best attacking players is unceasing. There is always a subliminal conviction among English rugby folk that somewhere, somehow ‘we have the players’ – it is just the systems and people around them which are failing. Get those right, and the Red Rose would be a world-beater.
Orchestrating the media chorus more often than not is Sir Clive Woodward, head coach of the only England (or northern hemisphere) side to have hoisted the Webb Ellis Cup back in 2003, and erstwhile contributor to The Daily Mail. If If Henry Arundell represents the attacking conscience of English rugby on the field, Woodward is its ambassador in the media.
Midway through the World Cup, after England had put 71 points on a luckless Chile, Sir Clive opined in his Mail column: “It was the first time I can remember for a long time we have got a team playing with some real pace and real risk. If you ask, can you imagine playing this way against South Africa, Ireland or France, the answer is unequivocally yes. If you have got the coaching and the mindset to do it, you can, and this was a massive step forward.
This is the first time Steve Borthwick has coached a team to play like this and he would have learned a huge amount from last night in Lille. If you were a player, you would have loved playing in that match and the squad members on the sidelines would have been desperate to play in a game like that.”
Arundell scored five tries and Marcus Smith started at full-back, and both made it into the back three Woodward recommended for the knockout stages of the tournament: “With Smith it is about getting your best players on the pitch. My back three would be Arundell, who should have been in the team for a while, on one wing, Freddie Steward on the other and Smith at full-back.”
When push came to shove, as it always does in games against the Springboks, Borthwick reverted to type. Arundell and Smith were gone, and Steward returned to full-back with a pair of relative eminence grises bookending him on the wings in Jonny May and Elliot Daly. That trio won the kicking/fielding battle hands-down and England almost won the game against the eventual champions.
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