For an assortment of reasons England’s first Rugby World Cup warm-up Test may prove the most instructive of the lot. By accident or design it pits a largely experimental England side against an almost full-strength Wales on the eve of Eddie Jones’s final 31-man squad announcement for Japan, making it a match neither team can easily dismiss as a casual summer fling.
Should Wales win well at Twickenham and continue to jostle New Zealand at the top of the world rankings, the Six Nations champions will set out for east Asia feeling justifiably good about themselves. If, on the other hand, England’s eclectic pick-and-mix of a starting XV can give Wales’s first-choice regulars a hurry-up it will strongly suggest that Jones – Eddie not Alun Wyn – is potentially further ahead of the curve.
This is certainly no one’s idea of a run-of-the-mill England selection, containing as it does five new caps and some unexpected late bolters for World Cup participation. Not a syllable uttered in Bagshot contradicted the impression that Willi Heinz has leap-frogged all his scrum-half rivals to make the final cut, with the vice-captaincy on his Test debut further underlining his meteoric rise.
As recently as 2014 the 32-year-old was playing – and losing heavily – against a touring England side for the Crusaders. Suddenly he is England’s oldest starting debutant for 36 years, courtesy of a maternal grandmother from Hampshire and Jones’s desire for more savvy at half-back.
Equally interesting from a tactical standpoint is the choice of England’s two leading openside flankers, Tom Curry and Sam Underhill, in the same back row. It has been a regular feature of watching England to see them being outwitted by opponents with two natural “fetchers” in their ranks, not least Michael Hooper and David Pocock for Australia or Sam Warburton and Justin Tipuric for Wales. If this is just an experiment – Curry will wear the 6 jersey by virtue of being “slightly bigger” according to England’s assistant coach John Mitchell – it is a fascinating one nonetheless.
Then there is the selection at inside-centre of Northampton’s Piers Francis, previously regarded as having about the same chance of making England’s final 31 as Pope Francis. It has emerged, however, that Ben Te’o did not participate in all aspects of the squad’s warm weather training camp in Treviso and a strong performance by the 29-year-old Saint opposite Hadleigh Parkes and Jonathan Davies could yet propel him out of the supporting cast.
What seems to have caught Jones’s eye, as well as his experience of playing for the Auckland Blues, is Francis’s training-ground appetite, his fitness and a versatile range of skills that have seen him deployed across the backline, fly-half included. George Ford, England’s captain on Sunday, has been suitably impressed and suggested a little bit of extra midfield flexibility might just benefit the squad: “People get obsessed with having two ball players or two ball-carriers in the centre but I think you need a bit of everything in the game these days. There are different ways of getting over the gainline.”
Ford also waxed lyrical about the training ground form of England’s latest new wing Ruaridh McConnochie, invited to put down a marker in the continuing absence of the injured Jack Nowell. It is highly unusual, though, for major World Cup teams to be trialling five new caps at this stage, with Saracens’ summer signing Jack Singleton, Northampton’s Lewis Ludlam and Harlequins’ Joe Marchant all set for debuts off the bench.
With none other than Roy Keane having addressed the squad this week (the former Ireland footballer knows a fair bit about World Cups in Asia) and the players stepping up their Japanese language lessons – Jonny May is top of the class on the basis he can count from one to 10 – there are also plenty of other distractions that Wales, for whom Alun Wyn Jones will become his country’s most-capped player, clearly have the ability to exploit.
When England’s coach talks about “giving the home crowd something to smile about” he can only hope it does not involve too many party-pooping tricks from Warren Gatland’s men. Ford, for one, accepts that meekly settling for a respectable home defeat at this stage of the World Cup cycle is not the way ahead. “As players we want to start building a winning mentality now. I don’t think after four weeks of games you can just pick up a mindset of ‘Right, lads, we’ve got to start winning now.’ It’s got to become a habit.” A dull, uneventful Sunday afternoon in south-west London feels unlikely.
