In time honoured tradition, the knives are out at Twickenham again as the English press have stirred the pot around the national team on the eve of an international competition, with The Times’ Owen Slot questioning the Steve Borthwick culture in a sourced ‘exclusive’. But is this really history repeating itself, is it an endemic issue within the game or is it pure press hyperbole? Or is it that the real problem lies with the people who keep appointing them, reviewing them and deciding when their time is up?

In the lead-up to any big England international series, in any of the three major sports, unless things are completely hunky-dory within the national game, there’s likely to be an article or two that decries the future of the England team, the England coaching staff and the sport itself in this country. Lo and behold, The Times provided us with exactly that this morning, two days out from the Test against Australia.

Let’s take a step back. In 2022 The Times published an eviscerating piece on Eddie Jones, which culminated in a stand-off between the paper’s correspondent and Jones at a press conference, one where I was in the room and the England head coach announced “you and I are finished, mate” and refused to take any more questions.

Jones returned to it in 2024, in a Paris interview before Japan played England, when he called Slot “a quite spiteful person”. However, a good newsman has to write the truth as he finds it, and Slot’s reputation is one of impressive stature, so the question here is what these stories are really trying to prove.

Ironically, this morning’s edition reads as a crisis piece which then ends up predicting a decent autumn. On one hand: “This is England on the brink. They have snookered themselves once again.” On the other: “I actually think England will have a decent autumn.” Does that suggest the article itself can’t decide which story it’s telling?

What the evidence actually says

Let’s just look at the evidence: a review which has been roundly lambasted, 14 yellow cards and one red in eight matches, four coaches who have all coached defence, and “many sources” and “sources close to the team” leaking all sorts of stuff from inside the camp.

Let’s be honest about this. These are international athletes under immense pressure; occasionally there are going to be clashes, and it really depends on which day a player is interviewed as to what information you’ll get out of him.

The other point is that English rugby is incredibly prescriptive. Whilst the players continually suggest they’re confused, the great teams are self-coaching, and the whole purpose of great Test leadership from the management is to create an environment where players are able to make decisions for themselves.

The article goes on to say that “the concern from sources close to the team is that this may be a product of the pressure handed down from the top”. Well, wake up and smell the coffee, boys. This is Test rugby; yes, there’s pressure, and under pressure only the best survive.

Put simply, the issue here could be characterised as pressure without clarity; which is another matter entirely. Players must be accountable for their decisions, and coaches must be accountable for giving them the understanding and confidence to make those decisions in the first place and it’s pretty clear there’s a major disconnect there.

Felix Jones and the Shaun Edwards question

In fairness, the Felix Jones exit, the overlapping defence roles and a review that the players straight-batted, torn between loyalty to their wage cheque and loyalty to their coach, are all fair game. The flip side is that South Africa were already making a play for Felix Jones, and it was widely understood, if never stated as fact, that Jones was very keen to go back and work with his beloved Springboks.

There’s been talk and speculation in the media about Shaun Edwards, his passion to coach England, his track record and so on. Yet our sources, and there are several of them in the French game at both national-team and club-leadership level, all suggest that Edwards is a spent force: a man with great passion and great belief in what he delivers, who continually delivers an outdated defensive system through very confrontational communication.

Edwards works well with a 13 led hard blitz, something that’s been enormously effective prior to 2021, but modern nuances such as moderated push defences, cascading line numbers to control aerial threats and so on, are systems that Edwards simply does not coach or employ. It’s his way or nothing and the in the modern era modern defensive organisation requires more than the ability to rush an attacking line. It requires changes in the speed and shape of the press, the capacity to moderate pressure when the attacking system changes, and the knowledge to swap from man watching systems to ball marking systems as the game conditions demand.

The feedback we got from three sources, including two internationals who’ve played under him and a Top 14 coach, was that England should go nowhere near him as he was likely to cause disharmony and unlikely to improve technical structure, for all of his obvious nationalistic passion.

For sure, the coaches are competing for territory, but a coaching group should never be an oligarchy; it should be a democracy, and this is about empowering players.

The problem lives at Twickenham

Moving on, you have to ask yourself whether, at its core, the problem here is the RFU itself. Some big salaries fly around Twickenham Towers, and the RFU has already been caught out protecting its own KPIs. In 2023/24 the win rate of their campaigns overlapped by two matches to mysteriously inflate the results, allowing them to claim publicly, and to the assembled media, that they had reached their KPIs. The only reason they reached them was that they double-counted games against the USA and Canada across two sets of accounts, and then sheepishly admitted at the press conference, again one that I attended personally, whilst shuffling papers and tapping on calculators: Words like Ah yes, we appear to have done that. How’s that happened? left the room stunned and it remains moot whether this ’rounding error’ was made accidentally or in vain hope of it slipping under the press’s radar.

Whilst Bill Sweeney and Conor O’Shea certainly have England’s best interests somewhere in their thoughts, self preservation of their roles always seems to be rather more central to the true beat of their heart. Some may argue that they lack the win-at-all-costs approach that Eddie Jones and Ian Ritchie showed before them. Ritchie camped on Jones’s doorstep to get him to sign for England, and during that process, when Jones asked Ritchie what he wanted, the answer was: “I don’t care, I just want England to win. Whatever it takes.” Jones has admitted to me that this was a quality he admired and one that won him over for his new role.

O’Shea, in Slot’s piece, says: “There has been a tendency for almost every difficult result or staffing change to be accompanied by speculation about Steve or his leadership.” You wonder what goes through senior leaders’ heads when they defend the decision-making by defending the person making the decisions.

Sunday, and where the match-winners are

Moving forward, we don’t share that optimism for England’s autumn. Sunday’s match against Australia couldn’t come at a worse time for England, who are without several influential players, including their chosen and favoured half-back pairing; they have no continuity in midfield, and they have a pack that, whilst powerful and muscular, lacks the craftsmanship of the likes of Fraser McReight and Harry Wilson in the Wallaby back-row.

The fundamental fact is that in the last ten years England have produced one, maybe two, of what you might call, in Instagram speak, S-tier players. Manu Tuilagi was one, a man who could crack open a Test match like a walnut in a bear’s paw; a phenomenal rugby player. Maro Itoje, for pure consistency, and Owen Farrell might, at a push, be considered at that level, but rarely have those two picked up a Test match on their own and changed the result, and rarely do England produce that level of player.

Without players who swing Tests, you need a coherent system, which brings us back to the staff.

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The Eddie Jones comparison

It’s mind-boggling that the England coach with the best win record only ever had one Rugby World Cup cycle, and it ended in a final. Sure, England under Borthwick pummelled their way to a bronze medal in 2023 after about ten months in charge, but the road England travelled to that semi-final was one of the easiest and least convoluted a Rugby World Cup draw has ever produced, with a weakish group of Argentina, Japan, Chile and Samoa followed by Fiji in the quarter-final stage.

Slot writes that O’Shea and Sweeney “backed Eddie Jones until it was too late”, yet also accepts that “their sacking of Jones ten months before the previous World Cup was disastrous timing”. The two statements can’t both be true, unless the argument is suggesting that Jones should have gone before the 2022 losses that reduced his win rate from 79% to 73%, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Discipline is the players’ business

Where does this leave us? With another crisis piece on the eve of a Test, and a coaching group apparently struggling to speak with one voice, surrounded by players whose actions on the pitch don’t always match either the intentions of the men preparing them or the laws of the game.

By the World Rugby law book, discipline ultimately belongs to the players, because yellow and red cards happen over the whitewash and are rarely seen in the chief executive’s office. Whether at Twickenham or Pennyhill Park, confused defensive systems and mixed messages may contribute to this downfall, but these are highly paid professional rugby players, not bewildered schoolchildren waiting for somebody to tell them which way to tackle; in short, they need to sort this out themselves and man up.

Yet Slot’s article, for all its legitimate concerns, rather neatly illustrates the confusion consuming English rugby. The players are confused by the coaches; the coaches are apparently confused by their responsibilities; the RFU is confused by its own appointment measures; everybody’s confused by the employment strategy, and the people responsible for overseeing the whole circus seem perpetually confused that anybody might question their judgement. It’s a pantomime farce that would draw approving nods from the Right Honourable Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes Minister fame.

Therein lies the real problem. England may lack game-changing players, but what they lack most is the clarity, accountability and collective purpose that turns a group of good international players into a genuinely great international team. Both Clive Woodward and Jones, whatever their faults, understood this, and both recognised that excellence is something you don’t announce in a strategic review, nor discover by moving a few names around a whiteboard in a team meeting.

The RFU, meanwhile, appears to have perfected the art of appointing people, reviewing their appointments, defending their reviews, and then commissioning yet another review when those original appointments fail to deliver. It’s an extraordinary achievement in administrative self-preservation, and the only crumb of consistency in the whole farce, even if the rugby remains resolutely ordinary.

Until somebody at Twickenham finds the courage to examine the people making the decisions, rather than endlessly interrogating the people employed to execute them, and to go under the bonnet of the game’s culture itself, England will continue to mistake furious activity for real progress and excuses for explanations. They’ll deliver nothing but breathtaking mediocrity, whilst claiming it’s a perfectly acceptable return on an extraordinarily expensive investment.