Jim Mallinder, Northampton’s director of rugby, has queried Dylan Hartley’s omission from England’s ill-fated World Cup squad. “When you’re picking your team you want your best players playing, full stop,” he said. “I’d want Dylan Hartley in my team, whether that’s for Northampton, England or the Lions.”
England’s long-established hooker was left out because of a suspension that would bar him from England’s opening match of the tournament. It was felt too much of a gamble to go into the game against Fiji with only two of three hookers available. Then Wales and Australia proceeded to pick only two hookers for the entirety of the tournament (although Australia have since added a third).
“I look around at other countries and they do their very, very best to get their best players available,” said Mallinder. “I don’t think we did that. Dylan brings massive experience and his set-piece work is one of the best in the world.”
Mallinder was joined on Thursday by all the other Premiership directors of rugby at the official launch of the new domestic campaign. Naturally talk of Stuart Lancaster’s job was high on the agenda and while none of them stood up to say they wanted it, Mallinder was happy to admit it remains an ambition for him. But the theme that kept emerging was regret at the inflexibility of Lancaster.
Hartley’s non-selection may be one example but the problems went deeper than that. Rob Baxter, Exeter’s director of rugby, said: “Stuart was put in place because the England players were deemed to have been [at the last World Cup] on a bit of a jolly. It certainly wasn’t as black and white as that but you can’t change that to now all the players are going to be perfect, which is what the RFU wanted. There has to be a middle ground. I’d have liked to see a really vibrant, characterful England team, enjoying themselves, celebrating some good moments. What we’ve actually seen is very little enjoyment, very few smiles, very few characters. It should have been the best experience of their lives.”
Most of the coaches at the Stoop on Thursday have players they are going to have to manage, either because they have been in the firing line the past few weeks, or because they have not and feel they should have been. Conor O’Shea of Harlequins spoke passionately in defence of Chris Robshaw, who is the only Harlequin who will be given a break when he returns from the England camp, and railed against the “hindsight coaching” of people who think they would have done differently.
Richard Cockerill of Leicester felt the Manu Tuilagi situation could have been handled more sensitively by attributing his absence from the squad to injury rather than suspension. He hopes Tuilagi will return to action by the new year and claims to be “90%” towards agreeing a new deal with the centre. “Manu would have liked more support [from the England management, following his altercation with a taxi driver in April],” Cockerill said. “You can’t excuse what he did but he’s a young man and he was in a bad place with his injury. There are lots of Kiwis who misbehave. They don’t punish them. They help them.”
Baxter has a young centre of his own at Exeter in Henry Slade, who was overlooked when it mattered, albeit for different reasons. Had England incorporated his creative skills into their back division against Wales, Baxter believes they would still be in the tournament.
“The criminal thing in the Wales game was that England’s forwards had so much dominance it should never have come to a fightback by Wales. A more adventurous selection would have reaped dividends. England should have been 20-25 points clear. They didn’t need to pick a backline to win a close battle. They got the kind of game they picked the team for. When you go from having a successful game against Wales, as they did the last time they played them, with a certain formula – to drop out of that formula takes some answering. I think that’s the million dollar question we’re all baffled about.”
