Bigger, stronger, faster?
by Mick Cleary | 15 June 2010 (10:28)
The inquest into England’s sub-par performance against Australia at the Subiaco Oval has been rather painful. There has been a visible change in the body language of the England management: less laid-back and open, more inward-looking and preoccupied. As they have every right to be. This is their job, and their players didn’t stack up on Saturday, beaten not just on the scoreboard but in every phase bar the tight scrummage.
And the greatest discrepancy was in the physicality the Aussies brought to the game. You wonder how that can be when their back line featured, among other big-hitters admittedly, James O’Connor and Berrick Barnes, baby-faced and hardly beefcakes. Yet in nearly every point of collision, it was the Wallaby who came off the better.
As England back-row forward, James Haskell, put it: ‘ Getting beaten for skill or ability is one thing, but coming off second-best in the physicality stakes is quite another thing.’
It’s an affront to a professional rugby player’s manhood, his sense of worth, call it what you will, to be bested in contact. But that’s so clearly what happened in Perth. There were other things in play, of course, such as the snazzy handling of the Aussies, their clever angles, their upbeat attitude, their desire to play, their intricate close patterns – a whole host of things. But, primarily, they looked stronger.
13 years ago when Clive Woodward was undertaking the task that Martin Johnson is now engaged in, that is getting English rugby up to scratch, he used Josh Lewsey, then a young thing and very inexperienced, as an example for others. Woodward pointed out, quite literally in getting Lewsey to strip off, that England lacked muscle as well as power, and that if they aspired to beat the southern hemisphere then they had to get in shape as Lewsey had done. Two years later, they were all like Lewsey. It was no coincidence that England shortly afterwards began their run of 12 consecutive victories over the southern hemisphere Big Three.
And now ? Why are England so off the pace ?They claim that their conditioning is up to the mark. So much time and money is invested into conditioning as well as the science of well-being, that you’d damn well hope that it wouldn’t be any other way. In Woodward’s day, players had yet to discover the true benefits of professionalism. Once they did, Woodward used every resource at his disposal to make sure English players stacked up.
The difference now has to come down to one of attitude and/or practice. Once again, the game in the northern hemisphere has been shown up as one-paced. In part, this is due to climate, in part to the way the game is refereed. There is little doubt that the shift in refereeing interpretations late in the season made a massive difference at the breakdown. The Super 14 had been playing that way since the start of their season. European sides only got on that wavelength in mid-March. The speed of the game increased dramatically.
As the weekend’s results showed, Europe is playing catch-up. They’ve got 15 months to get it right. If they don’t, the 2011 Rugby World Cup will be a southern hemisphere affair.
