England have become something ugly, brutish and formidable to play against | Andy Bull
Steve Borthwick has engineered his team to get stronger in the last quarter and the All Blacks could not cope with this monstrous lotThere’s the England they sell you in the glossy magazines and then there’s the England you find on days like this one at Twickenham,Cold, grey, hostile, the days when anyone lucky enough to have the choice takes one look out the window and realises time is going to be best spent indoors,The All Blacks did not have that luxury,Their head coach, Scott Robertson, spoke in the week about the work he had done to prepare his players,“We’re looking forward to it,” he said.
Perhaps he really believed it,But so long as England are playing like this, it will be a long time till any team takes any pleasure in the prospect of a day out here,You could feel this England performance coming,It was in the air during the previous couple of weeks, when they beat Australia and Fiji, and it was there in the air again before the match,It was one of those foreboding days when Twickenham looks more like the national stadium at Mordor, and the orcs have brought 80,000 fans who want blood.
England arranged themselves into a “U” formation to face down the haka, led, at the edges, by Henry Pollock and Jamie George, who walked right up to the halfway line and stood there staring at the opposition as if they were eyeballing the prime rib at the carvery.Steve Borthwick has been busy in that laboratory of his.After three years in the job he has built this England into something ugly, brutish and formidable.They are a monstrous lot, all marauding forwards and rampant backs, a team that run on pride, piss and vinegar and carry an air of violent intent.They look hell to play against, dropping high bombs from the rooftop and barrelling down the channels, smashing into lunatic tackles.
Eight minutes from the whistle, New Zealand had the put-in at a scrum in their own 22.England were playing without a No 8 after Ben Earl had been sent to the sin-bin.They were six points up, 25-19, and it ought to have been a prime time for New Zealand to do that thing they always used to and break the length of the field to score that one final try against the head and win the game.Not today.Not against this team.
England’s seven forwards set themselves and shoved, and the eight New Zealanders twisted, crumpled and buckled, like a car bonnet in a slow-mo crash test video,The ball spat back to their replacement scrum-half, Cortez Ratima, but before he could get his pass away Pollock had wrapped him up in a ripping, twisting, tearing tackle that seemed to sweep him off his feet,It was like watching a cod try to fight an octopus,New Zealand got the ball away downfield, but it was only a moment before England were back at them again,This time Pollock was hacking the ball on towards the tryline for Tom Roebuck to gather it in and score.
It wasn’t flawless from England.Far from it.They went 12-0 down in the opening quarter, and seven of them came directly from an error, when George Ford’s restart went straight into touch and New Zealand ripped England’s defence apart from a starter-play at the ensuing scrum.New Zealand did a number on the English lineout in those opening 30 minutes, too, and stole, or spoiled, three of them in a row.Time was, and not so long ago, when it would have been a long way back from a start like that and long odds that England would make it.
This time they just came remorselessly on, battering their way back into the match with a barrage of contestable kicks,Sign up to The BreakdownThe latest rugby union news and analysis, plus all the week's action reviewedafter newsletter promotionFord sent up another of them and this time it broke England’s way after it had bounced,All of a sudden, there was Ollie Lawrence haring down the left, through Billy Proctor, past Cam Roigard, through Beauden Barrett and rolling over the line,By the time Ford had banged over a couple of drop goals – “They were always part of the plan,” he said – it was a one-point game that, strange feeling this, felt as if it was heading only one way,England, marshalled by Ford, led in the loose by Lawrence and Sam Underhill, had more pace, more power and a smarter gameplan.
Borthwick stuck with his starting XV, making the one necessary change, after Freddie Steward suffered a head injury, deep into the second half.It was not even clear who needed to be replaced, because they were so good in those middle 40 minutes, when they scored 25 points without conceding.But Borthwick has engineered this team so they get stronger in the last quarter and, at the very point when New Zealand were beginning to think they had weathered the worst of it, here came Pollock and Ellis Genge and Tom Curry and the rest of the barbarians off the bench.Argentina are due here next, Wales and Ireland not long after.There is not a side among them who will be relishing the prospect after this.
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