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.