Its been a few days now but I still feel so gutted. I can not believe that this has happened. This is an article that I never thought I’d ever have to write. England are out of the Rugby World Cup and are the first host nation ever not to get through the group stages.
Even though England were dreadful Australia were actually very good. I thought they looked like a team that could go very late into this competition and now look like contenders. The Ozzies were decisive and took advantage of a weak England defence. The World class players in the Ozzie squad stepped it up and Foley was a model play-maker for them. This Ozzie team is a very different team from a year ago before Cheika took over. He has complete turned them around and did something that maybe England need to do. That being that he has said the best player will be selected and I don’t care where they ply their trade.
I don’t want to lay into England to much because so much has been said and written over the last few days. However I do feel that they didn’t really show up. What I mean is that mentally they weren’t switched on. The reason for this I believe is the pressure. England were supposed to be very fit and we have some very talented players and would have trained the skills and set pieces to death. Pressure is something that you can’t train for and can affect each person differently. One thing that pressure can do is cloud the mind and this is what I think it did to England and in doing so clouded our judgement and we then weren’t as sharp as we should have been for a World Cup.
The other problem I think is that less that a handful of the squad have played at a World Cup before and this includes the coaching team. This showed, the team did seem a bit rabbit in a head lights and it didn’t help that their first World Cup experience was at Twickenham that can be an incredible intimated place for both away and home teams because of the expectation and hope that the home fans bring.
The English players do not have anyway near the amount of experience or RWC experience as the majority of other teams. Biggar has more caps that Farrell and Ford put together. England have only 13 players with over 30 caps and 5 players with over 50 caps in the squad. If you compare that to other teams, Wales have 17 over 30 caps and 11 over 50 caps, Australia 17 and 12, then South Africa 18 and 10 with lastly the All blacks with 21 and 10. Plus each of these teams has players that have over 100 caps where as England’s most is 61. This shows a huge different in experience and how England are just to far behind at the moment.
England’s strengths over the last few decades have been the power in the forwards and the territory game that we play. This time round it didn’t happen and we didn’t seem to sort out the problems that were obvious over the last two months. The lack of discipline, weak set pieces and the turnovers both in giving away to many and not turning enough opponents ball over, were all their right from the start of the warm up games and didn’t seemed to be addressed.
What happens next for Australia is that they have Wales and I would expect them to win and get through to the Quarter finals as group winners especially after watching Australia get their record win at Twickenham. If they do win this group I think we will see them make the final because they will likely face Scotland in the QF and then France, Ireland or Argentina in the SF and I would expect them to beat all of those teams.
For England it is a case of just finishing off the competition with some pride by beating Uruguay convincingly and giving some players a run out that haven’t played so far. We have a young inexperience team that needs game time and it is a talented team so the more minutes on the pitch in big settings the better. The RFU will have an inquiry after the World Cup and I hope they get down to the bottom of this despicable and embarrassing performance. I hope this will motivated everyone to make sure it is never like this again and that we now look up and to Japan in 2019. I will never forgot this because of how much hope I had and how low I feel now.
SweetEngland 