Zimbabwe News Update
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15 min read
England have shuffled their starting back row to face Fiji after last weekend’s 25-7 win over Australia.Chandler Cunningham-South has come in to start at No 8, with flanker Sam Underhill out of the 23, and the highly-rated Tom Curry and Henry Pollock kept on the bench.With next week’s visit of New Zealand to Twickenham looming large, is it a case of England head coach Steve Borthwick not knowing his best line-up, or is there a reliable method to the chopping and changing?Maro Itoje is named on the bench for the first time since 2017 (Photo: Getty)Borthwick has decided his team are unlikely to dominate all their rivals at the top of the world rankings – England are currently fourth behind South Africa, New Zealand and Ireland, with France just behind in fifth – on sheer size alone.Instead, he wants an England team that can “run hard”, and play “brave, fast rugby, that’s aggressive with the ball” – and that, by extension, means running hard and being fast and aggressive for the entire 80 minutes.This guiding principle explains how the number and the type of forwards in his matchday 23, and why the number of backs on the bench gets squeezed to two or even one.And then the next trick is to decide how and when each of those forwards is going to be used during a match, with the number of rucks and breakdowns far exceeding scrums and line-outs – although not to the point of making the set-piece something to ignore completely.The newly-released film of the British & Irish Lions’ summer tour is a reminder of how brilliant Curry can be at his best – his cover tackle on Australia’s Joseph Suaalii was an exemplar of workrate.Borthwick this week showed two such clips of Curry to his England team, as “they were the exact image of how we want top class international back rowers to play”.Alongside it, Borthwick displayed the viral clip of Toronto Blue Jays coming within an agonising few centimetres of a winning run in the recent World Series – the point being how Curry’s efforts on and off the ball may seem marginal, but they all make a difference.“[It is] what he does in those little moments to close down space to make someone pass earlier or somebody to have to come back in rather than go outside, because he’s worked into position that fast,” Borthwick said.“It might not be the big moment of someone running away 50 yards and scoring the great try.“But it might be the moment that creates it, back in the backfield: the moment that caused the ball to run loose.”Steve Borthwick has shown he isn’t afraid to tinker with his squad (Photo: Getty)All things being equal, then, Curry would be one of the first names on the England team sheet.But he has yet to play for his club Sale Sharks this season, due to injury, and England have picked him on the bench for the first two matches so far.
How do they decide?Borthwick is a fan of cold, hard data – including “event” data taken from matches and from training, when “somebody does something and it gets measured, ticking a box.”But he also needs to use rugby smarts and feel.“[Data] doesn’t measure someone who didn’t touch the ball but ran that bit harder that forced someone to pass that little bit earlier,” the coach says.“We scour the video, finding those moments where someone did push someone and then you can start linking it to the video with how fast they’re running, using GPS, so you’ve got all their speeds.
But that’s not quick, that process.”Borthwick confided toThe i Paperlast week he is not interested in flashy terms like “bomb squad” for the use of five or six forwards – or even perhaps seven in future – among the permitted eight replacements.But he is very interested in their impact to maintain the overall pressure and quality, and it helps if back-rowers like Ben Earl, Henry Pollock and the newer face, Guy Pepper, can double up as backline players – not necessarily from the start, but when injuries or match situations demand. This, by the way, is not a new idea.Twenty years ago, the then Saracens’ coach Mike Ford (father of George) said this when the club signed Andy Farrell: “He will start at inside centre.
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