One minute England are criticised for being too sterile in attack, the next they’re too wasteful. Stuart Lancaster, as ever, plotted the moderate line, following his team’s 25-13 win over Scotland, in which they bombed chance after chance.
“You don’t get try-scoring opportunities without good attack,” the head coach said, “but only to convert three is frustrating. It’s about composure and execution. And patience is the other word I’d use. If you make a line break, don’t feel you have to pull the trigger and score on this particular play, because sustained possession would have resulted in opportunities. That said, we haven’t seen many teams pull Scotland apart the way we did.”
That much is true. George Ford was pulling strings masterfully, and his three-quarters found themselves in wide open space again and again. To emerge from the first quarter of the game only 7-0 ahead was extraordinary. And it may yet prove costly, with Ireland and Wales chomping at the bit just behind England on points difference, going into the final round.
“If we’d scored four or five tries as opposed to three, we’d be in a better position. But we didn’t.”
Lancaster will be consulting his psychology manuals over the next week, as he considers how best to handle his charges as they build up to that climactic final round. Wales’s defeat of Ireland means there are three teams who could realistically win the title. England, whose game against France will be the last of the day, will know what they have to do, a situation Lancaster is grateful for.
“It’s definitely better than the situation we were in last year,” he said. “To understand what you need to do in the final game is important, but we’re going to end up in the same situation as here – we’ll be warming up as one game’s finishing. If you start concentrating too much on what you’ve got to do in terms of points differential you’ll lose the game. You’ve got to win the game first, and that’s a big challenge for us against this French team, who have threats all over the park – a massive pack and a quality back-line.”
Both sides came away with grievances, England when they were penalised at an attacking scrum just as it seemed certain they were about to go 14-0 up after quarter of an hour. “The first scrum we are motoring over the line quite nicely and win a penalty,” said Graham Rowntree, England’s forward coach. “Then we get penalised. It’s very frustrating, and we’re going to have to have a good look at that. That can’t happen.”
But Scotland were aggrieved, too, when Dan Cole was offside later in the first half. “He pretty much came in from the side and dived on the ball,” said Greig Laidlaw, Scotland’s captain. “We were half a metre from the line. I think the referee could certainly have asked the question. That was a decision that could have gone our way. But for large parts our performance was absolutely brilliant. The difference between that and our performance against Italy was night and day. England came flying out of the traps, and I was a little bit worried, I’m not going to lie to you. But we got the boys collected under the posts and said, calm down. The response was magnificent.”
So both teams enter the final weekend in curious moods, part encouraged, part deflated. But the championship will remember this day as one that invigorated it.
