Goodbye to a giant

My first exposure to rugby was some sort of article about the 1995 World Cup in some magazine that was lying around the house. I didn't grow up in a house that followed the game; my dad had played a bit at school and that was it. I went to a primary school that did no organised sport at all. I can't even recall it being on the TV. Family legend says I only learnt to read so I could follow Crystal Palace's results but that was as far as my interest in the sports pages went. 

No, I didn't read about Jonah Lomu being awesome then. I mean, I probably did, but it doesn't stick in my memory. I vaguely recall hearing on the news about England getting knocked out, to no small extent down to some oversized freak of a wing. I was aware, in my distant way, that was a remarkable time for rugby; professionalism, black men in Springbok jersies, and 19 stone wingers. I knew I wanted to play this game. But I only really got involved when I went to secondary school and, the glories of 2003 aside, I only became truly fascinated with the game after I completed university, drifted back to my rugby club due to peer pressure and got sucked in by the 2009 Lions tour.

In all that time of half-interest, I knew who Jonah Lomu was. I knew he was amazing. I watched the 2007 World Cup final without really knowing a single one of the players, but Lomu? Yeah. Who could forget that video of him running over Mike Catt? In much the same way even people with no interest in Basketball know who LeBron James is, Lomu was unforgettable.

As my interest in the game has grown, so has my appreciation for what Jonah Lomu has done and his status in the game. He was rugby's first superstar and he did it  by changing the game. Wings of about his size are the norm now but looking back at the highlights, you know damn well that if he was around today he'd still be terrifying. He mightn't have scored 15 tries in 2 World Cups today but he'd have got close. The most incredible thing is he did it all with the kidney condition that would eventually bring first his career, and now his life, to a premature half.

The biggest loss is to Lomu's family. To see your son die is heartbreaking; to grow up always missing your father scarring. None of the acclaim and love for their loved one will take away their pain. It is a loss for all of rugby though. I think in all the sport's history, we've possibly only had one icon, and now he is gone. Wilkinson? McCaw? Carter? Amazing athletes but I don't think any of them have seized the global conciousness like Lomu did. My girlfriend is an American with no particular interest in rugby. She heard about Lomu's death. 

And because rugby is a small game, if you listen, you soon hear what players are like. Some are wazzocks, some are mad, but I've yet to hear a bad word spoken about Jonah Lomu. He was just a really nice guy.

A gentleman and a giant - may we see his like again.

Rest easy Jonah.

G'day Mr Jones

This morning, the RFU announced the appointment of Eddie Jones as the new England head coach, with a four year contract starting in December.

That was quick, wasn't it?

Last time around we'd only just had news of Johnson's resignation, nevermind the appointment of a new man. The plan had been an extensive search to find the world's best which ended up going on and on until we hit the Six Nations and Lancaster secured the hearts of most of the RFU. Everything about this time is different and speaking cynically, the fear remains that we are still fighting the last war and have made a mistake.

It is very easy to imagine this going wrong and not just because it involves the RFU, who specialise less in shooting their own feet than in blowing their own legs off. Reading around the internet to see what the learned men of the press have to say, it swiftly emerges that Eddie Jones can at times be, well, a bit difficult. Alex Sanderson's comments here put it most succinctly:

"He is very much his own man and unwilling to compromise. You can see that from the turnover of jobs he has had. In the wrong environment, people can find it hard to work with him. He pushes you so hard and that can be to the detriment of your own enthusiasm. It is a make-or-break scenario."

To a certain extent, this is a good thing. One's reminded of Jim Telfer laying into the Lions pack and telling them he's the judge. A good coach is not just a judge though; he's also a salesman. Should Eddie Jones push the players as hard as he can, harder than they think they can endure? Duh. Is it going to work if the players don't understand what Jones think he's getting from it or see what they're getting from it? No. Does it sound like Eddie's definitely one hundred per cent going to ensure they do get it? Hmm. Hmmm. HMMMM. It's probably quite a small chance, and nothing in life is guaranteed, but it is  a bigger chance than I'd like.

If things could go wrong with those below him, there is even bigger potential for them to go wrong with those above. We already know that Jones isn't too impressed with the structure of English rugby which as far as I'm concerned, just goes to prove he's a sensible chap. If he means to put words into practice and try to start changing how the whole organisation works though, rather than merely sharpening the pointy end, then he may find himself running into a metaphorical pointy thing himself. Or maybe trying to insert one into the Teflon Don. I'm never going to tell a man not to fight for the betterment of English rugby but Jones would be advised to tread very carefully here.

If no culture clash or internecine conflict intervenes, what can we expect from Eddie Jones? Anyone expecting a guaranteed attempt at sexy rugby would be well advised to read this article by Dean Ryan - he will have no problem in deciding his team is not up to an expansive game plan and that victory lies in grinding away. He's also successfully worked with Jake White, in case further evidence is needed.

Before anyone says it - yes, England have looked good playing expansive rugby at times recently. Yes, we have no shortage of speed merchants who like to see the game played wide and there's a case to be made for England building a team to exploit that. The problem is that while we have the speed merchants, we have a problem when it comes to the technicians and generals needed to create the space out wide to begin with. Disagree? Comment please. Come at me and all that waffle.

Expansive or not, Jones likes big back lines. Look at the 2003 Australia back line. Wendell Sailor? Big. Stirling Mortlock? Big. Lote Tuqiri? Big. Larkham was pretty big for a fly-half as well. The 2007 back line he ran for Jake White was along similar lines as well. To date, he's usually put out a playmaking 12 and some big lads with a bit of toe and decent hands. If he sticks to type, that's good news for Manu Tuilagi, and not so good news for Jonathan Joseph... or most of the current England back line, in fact, which is quite small. Would he prefer Rokoduguni and Yarde to May and Watson? Time will tell. 

He likes his sides to be technically adept and he likes them to keep the ball in play - Lancaster has tried to build in this direction, with mixed results. He played with two opensides in the 2003 World Cup final. If I could, I'd tell him that over here, Robshaw and Wood are considered opensides and nothing need changing there, simply to see the look on his face. I suspect his priorities will be to build a scrum so steady you could use it as a table for Christmas dinner, a line-out of similar reliability (I see some quite boring drill sessions in the England players' future), find a back row with pace and breakdown ability as well as an inside-centre who can distribute, and then work on the England players' handling and ability to use space. Minor things, really. No big sweat. I'm sure Lancaster never considered them... wait, no, most of them appeared on Lancaster's list, with mixed results. The set-piece can be fixed quite easily I suspect, particularly if Jamie George keeps up his form and comes into the team. Henry Slade might be odds-on to be England's starting inside-centre next Six Nations. Matt Kvesic and Will Fraser have big opportunities to become part of the team but neither seems as guaranteed to me as Slade, perhaps unfairly. The intelligent use of space... well. One thing at a time.

The main thing we expect from Jones though is success. He's had plenty of it, from the upwards curve of Japan that thrust him back into the rugby world limelight with that victory, to his initial successes back in Australia back at the turn of the millennium. He's had his failures too - just ask Queensland rugby fans - but that does mean he's erratic and prone to getting lucky, or a man who's learned the most essential lessons before coming here? This job is arguably going to answer that question for many; this will probably be his defining moment. Success, and he joins rugby's greats - particularly if he can go back to Japan in 2019 and win the World Cup there. Fail, and there will be no second chance to do so, or cast off the aspersions that he's just the man who inherited Rod MacQueen's hard work. There is everything to play for.

There is everything to play for with England's players too. They have a new coach to please now; a demanding, exacting coach looking for outstanding rugby players and workers to come and fulfil his vision and make them winners. Everything starts with the player's desire to be among that number.

After that, it's up to Eddie Jones. Good luck.

Post-Mortem 7: The Unforgiven

So, let's talk about Stuart, shall we?

In my mini-break it's been less a case of watching the grass grow under my feet and more a Rip van Winkle-esque trip to the future where we download rice and Davina McCall is the Pope. Stuart Lancaster is gone and debates as to whether that's the right idea are completely irrelevant. But then, the point of this series has been more "What went wrong" than "What do we next", so this article's still (hopefully) relevant which is just as well as I'd like to get a few things off my chest.

Here's the first thing. I thought he was a mistake at the beginning and barring a brief period during the 2013 Six Nations I've thought he was a mistake all the way through until now. I didn't expect the World Cup to happen, as he'd looked more competent than that to date, so I can't say "Told you so", but I can say "Thank fuck I can stop feeling like I have to be positive about a bad idea."

I can also say "This article might be biased against Stuart Lancaster". I like to think I'm fair and objective about everything but that is a damnable lie and the fairest thing is to be open from the beginning. I did not think he'd deliver anything particularly of note for the English rugby team and I'm happy I won't have to hear any more of his PR. 

That said, I wished this had ended better for him. He seems like a decent guy who only wanted to do his very best for English rugby and it feels like this experience has crushed him. That's shit, he didn't deserve that. As Clint Eastwood once said though, deserve's got nothing to do with it. It's happened and the question is "Why?"

Ignore the World Cup for a moment. Lancaster's got us to 4 6N second places. 4 wins out of 5 every time. If he'd got us that final step further once and he might have stayed regardless. Twice and I think he definitely would have. Think of all the close games lost to the SANZAR teams. England have had a demonstrable issue with crunch games all the way through Lancaster's tenure and come the two big games in the World Cup, we got the same thing again. In retrospect, maybe the outcome should have been more predictable; there's nothing too out of the ordinary about what happened. Personally speaking, I backed England because I saw Twickenham as a big factor. Relatively few of England's missed opportunities have come at Twickenham; maybe I'd have revised that opinion if I'd properly considered the pressure the England team was going to be under.

Pressure. The word is inescapable when talking about performances in big games. Lancaster can be partially absolved here because the best way to deal with that pressure is to have done so before and very few members of the team had done as much of that as their opponents. Only 6 members of the team had Lions test caps - both Youngs, Vunipola, Parling, Cole and Farrell. Only James Haskell had won the Heineken Cup and he was a bit player; only the Vunipolas, Goode, Farrell, Wigglesworth and Lawes can join him in saying they've at least been in the final. Only Haskell, Cole, Easter and Youngs had 50+ caps. We can quibble over the exact worth of some of these measurements but the overall picture I think withstands these quibbles and the overall picture says there were very few guys with lots of big game experience in the England team and it's not exactly a surprise when they fall down at the last moment as a result. 

However, there's things Lancaster could have done. One of them was to pack the team with experienced, big-game players where possible. Danny Cipriani could point to a Heineken Cup winners medal plus the experience of time spent playing in Australia. Tom Croft might have only just been back from injury but with two Lions tours and a Heineken Cup runners up medal, he had more pedigree than half of the forwards picked there. Mathew Tait, completely ignored, had played in a World Cup final - how many other Englishmen playing today could say that? Just three; Easter, Matt Stevens and Toby Flood. One wonders whether Lancaster regrets not persuading Flood to stay. Some might look at this list and protest at the point of including them as options - I know there's plenty who don't mourn Flood going. Some will look at Lancaster's reliance on young players as the best part of his reign, providing a legacy for the next man. There's something to that but there's quite a bit of work on for those players to make bombing out of a home World Cup worthwhile. I look at those players and see players who were good enough to be involved and think their experience might have been key in avoiding what happened.

The other thing he could have done was to prepare them for the pressure better. A coach's role here might be limited but when you see the captain making a hash of a late penalty when 3 behind in a World Cup then, well, you know it's bigger than Lancaster was filling. Every possible scenario that could have occurred in the last 10 minutes should have been tattooed on the leadership group's eyeballs. Whether that's Lancaster telling them what to do, or the players discussing it before hand is besides the point; the group needs to decide their best course of action before it comes up and then it needs to be backed up by every member of the group in public. Bitch about the execution if you will, but the course of action is a matter of collective responsibility. Lancaster's comments in the press conference didn't really feel like that was happening; England's performance definitely felt like he hadn't ensured they had all the information needed to succeed. 

Of course, inexperience aside, one of the traits considered most useful for winning big rugby games is a really good rugby team. I know, I'm fucking brilliant me with these radical revelations. It's pretty hard to have a good team of any sort if you keep replacing team members. We should all accept that rugby's a damn attritional game these days and that interferes with this but 14 different centre combinations sounds pretty damn extreme. 14! The problem here is slightly more serious than the never-ending case for an international 12 (you know things are bad when Shontayne Hape seems a good England inside-centre) though when you consider the big stylistic changes the England team have undergone since 2012 because if changing team members hinders a team, asking it to keep doing very different things is just not a good idea. The change from defence above all to Ford-inspired running from everywhere, from Barritt trundling to playmaking 12s and back again, and from big powerful forwards to skinny fit ones, all slowed the team's evolution. In the case of the latter, the last minute rush to do it may well have been responsible for the generally powderpuff nature of England's forwards, a key part in our failure. As for switching from Ford back to Farrell at the last moment - well, so much for learning from the last World Cup, eh?

Pretty much everything England did wrong at the World Cup - and most of the last four years to boot - can be traced back to either flawed big game preparation or indecisiveness leading to less than razor sharpness. And it's really super tempting to link those two things to a lack of experience on Stuart Lancaster's part. I'd hesitate to say I'm completely right to do so, because it's hard to definitively prove, but it does make total sense. Getting Leeds promoted and then relegated again followed by a stint with the Saxons doesn't provide much of an education in managing big games, nor does it give a comprehensive internal encyclopaedia of what works and what doesn't at the top. Inexperience, both as a club head coach and in terms of never playing international rugby, might also account somewhat for the reliance on his assistant coaches and particularly Andy Farrell - they were the guys who knew, so maybe Lancaster deferred too much. 

The biggest flaw of this argument is that by the World Cup, he was fairly experienced as an international and head coach. Not as much as many of his competitors, but a World Cup cycle as England's head coach is not to be sniffed at. The problem with experience is you have to learn from it and here we reach the crux - Lancaster didn't. The kick to the corner defines that to my mind - it's shocking that after the criticism Robshaw copped for it early in his captaincy that they didn't hammer out how to handle the situation properly from then on - but there's elements of it where ever you look. 

It should be noted again at this point that Lancaster's had to deal with a lot of impediments, some of his own making and many that weren't. Spending as much time with sponsors as he allegedly did is ridiculous. He's had less control over his players than most international coaches and his senior players represent the tail end of one of the less talented and lucky generations of England internationals. Then there's his own daft decision to lean heavily on Farrell while also taking on the seemingly diametrically opposed advice of Catt. He's had the CEO gob off about him not doing well enough for most of the last year. He's been a put upon man and for all I don't reckon he's the right man, the next man could do worst as a lot of those pressures aren't going to go away.

If the man with the chance does not learn though, it seems reasonable to gamble, particularly if the RFU will finally live up to its word and bring in someone who's done most of his education already. The rumours about Eddie Jones are piling up and frankly, I'm now in a bit of a rush to finish this all before they go and announce that as well. Really, this is the way it should be. I'm not saying England should never give a man his first chance at international rugby ever again - that would be fucking stupid - but the man should have earned it through prodigious feats at club level. Bonus points if they've demonstrated ability with one of the international age grade teams or as an international assistant. Sure, sometimes you can lucky if you punt on someone with potential. Sometimes you get Lord Baldermort. 

Most of the time you get Stuart Lancaster. A fine and decent coach out of his depth.