At the very moment the clock turned red, the pass came back to Dan Biggar. He spun on his heel and booted the ball out. Wales 28, England 25. Unknown agonies, these, for the shellshocked England fans filing out of Twickenham. All pale-faced and tight-lipped, still trying to figure how, exactly, their team had lost a game they’d led by 10 soon after half-time, and still by seven when there were 10 minutes to play.
All around, smiling, singing, Welsh men and women, so happy to have spoiled England’s party, their own only just beginning and bound to continue long into the night and on through to the end of the weekend. They were still there, singing Land of my Fathers, hours after the match was over.
Those final few minutes will haunt England, and their captain Chris Robshaw. A penalty, 30 metres out, to draw the score level, sent, instead, to the corner so they could try to force the win. Admirable, if it had come off. But an awful big “if” in a game of inches. “I thought they would have gone for goal, and the draw,” Warren Gatland said, twisting the knife. It was, he said, what he would have done.
Beforehand all the talk had been about Lancaster’s decision to drop Ford for Farrell, bring Sam Burgess in to play at inside centre, and shuffle Brad Barritt across outside. In the event, all three played fine. England’s backline had the necessary heft and solidity for a match that was an 80-minute dogfight, and which took a heavy injury toll on both sides. Farrell made his kicks, five penalties, a conversion and a drop goal. Barritt made his tackles. And Burgess led, from the team huddle, when he was the one man, not Robshaw, shouting final words of encouragement and exhortation at the team, through to the moment he hauled Mike Brown away from a fight with Gethin Jenkins.
He showed that, inexperienced as he is in union, he was well able to deal with the extraordinary pressure of the occasion, which was more intense than anything many of his teammates had ever experienced.
Aside from that, Burgess made a few short breaks, always recycling the ball quickly and cleanly for the next man, and put in some belting tackles. He made mistakes, fumbling a catch at the re-start, shanking a kick to touch, but recovered from them quickly. So all three, Farrell, Barritt, and Burgess, did exactly what Lancaster picked them to do.
It turned out that it wasn’t the coach’s gamble that defined the match, but the captain’s, the one Robshaw took when he decided to spurn that shot at goal. “That call comes down to myself,” Robshaw said. “It was a tough kick, we weighed up the options, we wanted to go for the win, the two driving mauls before we made some good ground and we thought if we got in a good position we could go for a win.”
So it goes. In the autumn of 2012, England lost 20-14 to Australia, and Robshaw was criticised for the way he repeatedly allowed Toby Flood to kick for touch in the final minutes when he could, instead, have taken shots at goal. The following week, England lost to South Africa by a single point, 16-15, and Robshaw was hammered again. Only this time he had decided to go the other way, and take the three points for the penalty rather than kick to touch. There were two minutes left to play, but England failed to claim the restart and South Africa won the match. It’s not the decision that counts on these occasions so much as the execution, and England’s, in all three instances, was poor.
Robshaw, devastated, explained after this match that he had spoken to the two kickers on the field, George Ford and Owen Farrell, and that they’d decided between the three of them that they wanted to go for the win. If it had been an easier kick, Robshaw said, they might have taken the shot at goal. Instead, a lineout. And they were bullied back into touch by the Welsh pack.
Then they set again after the Welsh clearance, 20 yards further back, for one last shot. This time the ball came down off the top to Richard Wigglesworth, who knocked it on. England were sloppy in those final moments, their thinking scrambled, their play imprecise. Under immense pressure, they cracked. By then, it has to be said, Burgess had left the field. Not that he would have changed Robshaw’s thinking if he had still been on it.
Before all that, it was England’s lack of discipline that cost them. They conceded 12 penalties, seven of them in their own half. With Biggar in such inspired form, it meant that England could never get far enough ahead to stretch Wales, and force them to switch the way they were playing.
So now England have a week to regroup, regather, for a match against Australia that promises to be more excruciating, more exhilarating even than this one. The stakes will be higher still, since it won’t just be the result on the line, but likely a few careers too.
