The French dined on English roast beef and the way they devoured the main course was a culinary delight, but the 53-10 result will have little significance come the World Cup.
Don’t dismiss England’s tournament prospects on their Six Nations failures. The same will apply in the shortened version of this year’s Rugby Championship in relation to the Springboks, All Blacks, Wallabies and Pumas.
The draw, by nature of it being a single round, is skewed and coaches are likely to maximise the use of the entire squad in preparation for the World Cup. The World Cup, and it is something I have consistently emphasised in World Cup years, is a six-week tournament, in which most of the fancied teams make it to the play-offs. There is usually one grouping that has a “three does not fit into two” scenario and the Boks, in 2023, are among that grouping with Ireland and Scotland.
The Springboks proved in 2019 that you don’t have to win every pool game to win the title. The Boks lost their opening match to the All Blacks in 2019 and it took an impressive England to shock the New Zealanders in the semifinals. A team must win every one of the three play-off matches to win the World Cup. There is room for error in the pool rounds. France, in 2011, even lost two pool matches but statistically still managed to sneak into the quarterfinals and then came within a point of beating the All Blacks in the final at Auckland’s Eden Park.
Too much emphasis gets put on this four-year cycle between World Cups. Coaches, who lose more than they win or who lose when they should be winning, hide behind the excuse that it is all part of a master plan building towards the World Cup. The reality is that a team can have a near perfect World Cup build-up, in the year of the World Cup or the preceding three years that make up a four-year cycle and still bomb in the play-offs and in some cases get whistled out of the tournament because of match officiating and loss of players to yellow and red cards.
Teams and players build momentum in the World Cup, no one match is played in isolation and a team’s fortunes can be decided by the outcome of another match.
Clive Woodward’s England were the in-form team going into the 2003 World Cup and they had won in New Zealand and Australia, but come the final it took a 99th minute extra-time drop goal from Jonny Wilkinson to beat the Wallabies, who had lost more matches than they had won going into the tournament. The All Blacks in 2003 put 50 points past the Springboks in Pretoria and 50 past the Wallabies in Sydney and lost to the very same Wallabies team in the semifinals a few months later. England, in 2007, got humiliated 36-0 in the Pool stages against the Springboks, but scrapped hard in the final before succumbing 15-6 to four Percy Montgomery penalties and long-range three pointer from Frans Steyn.
Teams and players build momentum in the World Cup, no one match is played in isolation and a team’s fortunes can be decided by the outcome of another match. There are no guarantees a team wins the World Cup and there is only one team that can win it, which is why the building for a World Cup four-year excuse is so lame. The reality is that teams produce different performances in different tournaments that are played outside the World Cup and in one-off tour-type internationals.
The Six Nations, in which France gobbled up England by a record 53-10 at Twickenham, is not the World Cup and should those two teams meet at the World Cup, the environment and pressure will be in absolute contrast to that of a week ago. Every rugby supporter outside of the UK loves to see England take a beating, but it would be naive to dismiss England’s September/October World Cup prospects because of their indifference in the first week of March.
I took great pleasure watching France win the way they did, but not for a moment did it make me think England won’t be trouble at the World Cup. Keep the champagne on ice, just for now, as reports of England’s death are exaggerated in the context of World Cup rugby.
• Mark Keohane is the founder of keo.co.za, a multiple award-winning sports writer and the digital content director at Habari Media. Twitter: @mark_keohane
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