For England these are era-defining days. Four years of planning essentially rest on the next four weeks, unless the whole starship implodes inside the next fortnight. Can they boldly go where only the boys of 2003 have been before? The final frontier will be tantalisingly out of reach until at least 2023 unless Eddie Jones’ mission proves successful.
It is ever thus at World Cups, where what goes up can easily plummet back to earth inside 80 minutes. England, if they are anywhere near as good as they aspire to be, really should top Pool C and be confident of defeating Australia, their most likely quarter-final opponents at this stage, in Oita on 19 October. Fail to raise their level when it matters and the feelgood factor that has slowly been building in Japan will have been just another mirage.
This black and white outlook is a consequence of Jones having long ago erased any shades of grey. Either the fierce training sessions, the dictatorial approach and the abrupt hiring and firing of key personnel have all been triumphantly worth it or history will view Jones’s slash-and-burn regime unfavourably. There is no real middle ground. By the head coach’s own admission, too, he has never seen it as his role either to nurture the next generation or play the Twickenham political game.
So forget about slow, incremental progress: how much higher can he drive the senior team over the next month? Even if Argentina, on Saturday, sneak a first win in this fixture for a decade, a red rose victory over France next Saturday would still see them safely into the last eight. But would you confidently stick your mortgage on any team winning five top-level World Cup games on the spin from now, including potentially against New Zealand, when they have not won either of the past two Six Nations titles nor beaten the All Blacks anywhere since 2012? For England to come good now, therefore, will take a giant leap of some description. They are a good side but not, as yet, a consistently great one.
Even Jones cannot be entirely sure if this significant status upgrade is pending. “It’s a bit like a teabag, isn’t it? You don’t know how good it is until you put it in the hot water.” It was a questionable analogy in some respects – full of holes and disposable is not how usually how top teams wish to be perceived – but the general thrust was accurate. Over the years there have been plenty of examples of England teams training brilliantly during the week only to fail to rise to the boil at the weekend.
It is not a question of trying to dazzle in the manner of New Zealand, so quicksilver behind the scrum in Japan so far. Equally, though, England cannot rely solely on blunt power and their admittedly impressive fitness. Chugging along, keeping things tight and hoping for the best is not going to be enough, as Ireland are starting to discover. The incidence of sides trailing at half-time before going on to win games has also been low, although Australia against Fiji and Japan versus the Irish were gripping exceptions. Fitness is a vital prerequisite but so is first-quarter dynamism and attacking precision of the sort Wales displayed against the Wallabies.
Defensively, too, England were not tested in all areas by Tonga and the United States. Take Elliot Daly. He remains a gifted runner whose pace, useful left boot and ability to give and take a pass – he was a very useful cricketer in his teens – have long since earned Jones’s trust. At some stage, though, a proper aerial examination is surely coming his way. Every full-back in the tournament will currently testify that standing beneath a high ball made slippery by the sweat of others is a desperately precarious business. As the stakes increase it will become harder still.
England also need others to step up. There is a theory that Billy Vunipola plays better when his brother Mako is on the field, as is now again the case. Either way, this is the moment to show he really can be considered among the best No 8s in the world, more destructive than Duane Vermeulen, as smart as Kieran Read. Can the popular Jamie George show himself to be as dynamic a presence as, say, South Africa’s Malcolm Marx or be as much of an emotional touchstone as Wales’s Ken Owens? Would Ben Youngs have finished the interception try Gareth Davies scored against the Wallabies and how will he fare if England’s forwards are not on the front foot?
Questions, questions. There are certainly more hanging in the air than at the equivalent stage in 2003 when pretty much every component of England’s team had been stress-tested multiple times in advance. Comparisons across generations are invidious but perhaps only three or four of the current squad – Maro Itoje, Mako Vunipola, Manu Tuilagi and possibly Owen Farrell – would, at this stage, definitely make a composite XV. It brings to mind the old joke: Jonny May might just fancy beating Jason Robinson over 30 metres but the latter is now 45 years old.
In fairness to all, the game has changed massively and even some of the 2003 gladiators would be taken aback by the conditioning levels of the current crop. But if England are to lift the Webb Ellis Cup they will need the modern-day equivalent of Robinson’s genius, Martin Johnson’s over-my-dead-body defiance and Jonny Wilkinson’s pressure management. When they have been at their best under Jones – not least against Ireland in Dublin in February and again at Twickenham in August – they have generally got out ahead early. In tighter games their game management has so far been less secure.
For that reason, with the big prize in mind, they could do with at least one tight pool contest – France are their final opponents – to toughen them up for, potentially, the even bigger challenges to come. As New Zealand have historically discovered, sides who breeze into the last eight are sometimes more susceptible to a physical ambush. Expect England to prosper against Argentina and France but there is still a way to go if they want to rule the world.
