There is an old story about Stuart Lancaster, from his first year in charge of the England team. That June they played South Africa in Durban. He had never been to the country before, and, in fact, he has admitted since that he had to look the city up on a map to find out exactly where it was. One thing the map didn’t show was the way to his seat, and, before kick-off, he got lost in the bowels of Kings Park. “I’d been to one or two Test grounds but I’d visited the bars more than the dressing rooms,” he said earlier this year. “I’d never been to many international games full stop.” He had never seen England play at Twickenham until he was hired by the RFU, and had never been to the Millennium Stadium till England went there to play Wales in 2013.
Lancaster has had to navigate his way through a lot unfamiliar, and hostile, territory. He has coped because he has always seemed to have such a clear idea about the direction he was leading the team in. He laid it all out in 2012, when he was first appointed. He explained then that he was planning to use his first 18 months in charge to “develop the squad, the culture, the gameplan”. Then, once he had whittled down the pool of players to a select few, the next two years between the autumn of 2013 and the World Cup would all be about fostering “stability and continuity”. He wanted to allow that group to gain “the necessary experience and to develop leadership on and off the field” and help them learn “an intuitive sense of what they’re going to do under pressure”.
“Necessary experience” and an “intuitive sense of what to do under pressure” are, it would be fair to say, two of the qualities England have lacked the most in the past fortnight. Lancaster also said in 2012 he wanted his XV to have 663 caps between them by the World Cup, a figure he arrived at by looking at the aggregate totals of the past four winners. That part of the plan has been long-since abandoned. His team on Saturday mustered only a little over half that many. He could field the very same XV in each of the 10 games England will play before the opening match of the next World Cup and they would still fall short of that total.
Lancaster argues, perhaps rightly, that England are on the right path. The problem is, they are just not as far along it as they were supposed to be. In the last 12 months, the very period in which England were supposed to be building “stability and continuity”, they have picked 47 players over 13 Tests. Only two men, Mike Brown and Chris Robshaw, started in all of them. England’s selections have been so scrambled in that time the team sheets could be served up on toast. Of those 47, 26 played in five Tests or fewer in that time, and seven made only one appearance. It is one of the old truths that a team can learn a lot more from a defeat than they can from a victory, but those lessons don’t count for much if the people learning them are not even in the team a few weeks later.
Some of the confusion can be put down to unfortunate circumstances. There have been injuries, of course, and defections, with Toby Flood moving to France and Joel Tomkins – remember him? – heading back to rugby league. And then there was the absurd scheduling of the summer tour which forced Lancaster to pick a squad for the first Test that did not include anyone from the two teams contesting the Premiership final, Saracens and Northampton. But even allowing for all that, there has been some muddled, and muddy, thinking.
Five men have been used at fly-half. And so, with only 10 games to go until the World Cup, England’s second choice in the position, George Ford, has yet to even start a Test. At the same time, nine different men have been used in the centres and 11 on the wings.
Lancaster has spent this autumn trying to tidy up the mess by picking, and stubbornly sticking with, the same players even though they have been performing poorly. He has been so determined to belatedly develop some of that “stability and continuity” that his thinking seems to have been thrown out of kilter. He said he wanted to pick players on form and so he left out Billy Twelvetrees who had done a decent job in the spring as the team’s second play-maker and, crucially, tactical kicker.
Twelvetrees just was not playing well enough for Gloucester. And yet, at the same time, Lancaster picked Owen Farrell even though injury meant he had played only 80 minutes for Saracens in the six weeks before the All Blacks match while Ford, who has been playing superbly at Bath, has been left on the bench.
England have only two more matches against southern hemisphere opposition, Samoa and Australia, in the next fortnight. After that they have the Six Nations, with hard away games against Wales and Ireland. Finally, three warm-ups: two Tests against France and a third against the Irish. Lancaster does not have time to make any radical turns, even if he wanted to. So, instead, he has decided that England will “not deviate from the course we’re on”, because, he says: “I believe in the coaches, I believe in the players and I believe in what we’re doing.”
Truth is, with 10 games to go, he has little choice but to keep on marching along this path regardless of whether he believes in it or not, and even if England’s press and public are not exactly sure that he knows where he is going.
