Two minutes from the final whistle, there was a pause in play. Thank God. Mike Brown was flat on his back, out cold. A little way off to his left, George Kruis was down, too, with a couple of medics kneeling over him. And still further across the field Brad Barritt was doubled up, covered in his own blood, his white shirt coloured claret. He had just collided with Quade Cooper, and a wound he had had stitched up only 15 minutes earlier had exploded open again. Behind him, Ben Morgan was bleeding too, from the bridge of his nose, and his cheek. It was carnage.
This wasn’t a perfect performance, far from it, but England played with such teak-tough heart and such iron-willed commitment that only the churlish would want to pick too many holes in it. The team gave so much, it was astonishing that their players had enough strength left at the end to stretch their muscles into smiles, let alone raise their arms above their heads in celebration.
England were utterly desperate to take this match and it showed. You could hear it in Chris Robshaw’s voice, as he bellowed: “We don’t give in, we don’t give in,” at his pack before they put the shove on in one of the game’s final scrums. Their long-term ambitions, you suspect, had been shelved for 80 minutes in pursuit of a badly needed win. And you might say it was about time too. The pomp and hoopla, the flags, fireworks, flamethrowers, the soldiers, sailors, slogans, school choirs, and Swing Low sing-a-longs, it was all starting to wear a little thin. All they needed to do was win. Let everything else fall into place in its own time. The 80,000 fans in the ground were happy to excuse even the lack of razzle-dazzle in the home team’s back line. They settled, instead, for cheering on old-fashioned English strengths, such as rolling mauls and rock-solid scrums.
as much possession, and twice as much territory. They had twice as many clean breaks, threw three times as many passes, and made three times as many runs for three times as many metres. But England held them at bay. Morgan, man of the match, described it as a battle. And so it was. He was in the thick of the fighting, along with Courtney Lawes and Tom Wood. The three of them were fantastic in the loose; as good, in fact, as they have ever been for England. Wood, of course, had a point to prove after being dropped to the bench for the game against Samoa. And Morgan, for the first time, managed to sustain for 80 minutes the kind of form he has shown in the past when coming off the bench to replace Billy Vunipola. Lawes made a series of brutal tackles, three in the space of two minutes at one point, each in a different part of the pitch. None of them were more important than his try-saving takedown of Adam Ashley-Cooper in the first quarter.
England had the edge at the scrum, and used it well. But it wasn’t just a question of brute force. They married the power and fury with a measure of shrewdness too. The single thing which seemed to most please Stuart Lancaster was that they had played “a smarter game”. And it was true that they made a much better job of managing the match, especially in the final minutes. They were six points up with 15 minutes to play. Australia strung together a dazzling passage of play, one of many they produced in the match, which ended when Israel Folau threw a pass – fractionally forward – that Rob Horne, out on the left wing, failed to catch. From the following scrum, England won a penalty, which they kicked downfield. They won the lineout and set up a rolling maul that rumbled on, irresistible, 10, 15, 20 metres into Australian territory, sapping the opposition’s energy and eating up precious time on the clock.
Another penalty. Ford took a snap drop goal, knowing that he would get another chance to take the shot off the tee if he missed – which he did but he got the penalty, from 32 metres out. That gave them a nine-point lead and at that point the game was dead. England had killed it. It was simple stuff. As was a lot of what England did. But it was effective.
Their first try came off the back of a scrum, won after Folau fumbled a kick from George Ford. It was a sharp piece of play from the fly-half. England had been lining up to run the ball but Ben Youngs threw out an awful pass. Ford leaned back to take it, then, still off-balance, changed his plan and booted the ball long on the diagonal into Australia’s 22. From the ensuing scrum, Barritt battered his way through once and Morgan came charging after, like a bull booted in the backside. He went through and over.
“What’s pleased me most about Ben is that he has stepped up as a leader,”Lancaster said. He will, the coach admitted, “be a hard player to shift now”.
There was some neat work before the second try too. Brown slid a grubber through the Australian line, and Jonny May set off in pursuit. Cooper beat him to it but he was gang-tackled into touch by Barritt and Billy Twelvetrees. Australia were smashed at the scrum and then Morgan had an easy finish, shooting off the back of the pack as if he had been blasted out of a cannon.
There was nothing too flash about any of this. Certainly, England produced nothing that compared, say, to the swift one-two series of passes with which Bernard Foley and Horne unlocked their defence, or the dummy Cooper sold Twelvetrees, or the brilliant breaks of Folau and Ashley-Cooper. But for now that didn’t matter a damn. The win was enough.
