On a memorable Saturday evening in spring 2024, I heard Andy Farrell, the Ireland coach whose cool intelligence and powers of motivation England could so desperately use as they seek deliverance from their present crushing inadequacies, describe how he had started the day on the touchline of a Dublin junior rugby field, watching a group of Under 13s play.
‘Did you feel the rivalry, the competitiveness from those boys on that field?’ Farrell asked, as one of our number said that he, too, had been there that morning, to watch Blackrock Under 13s team win. ‘It’s magnificent isn’t it? That’s what makes Irish rugby so special.’
Farrell’s motives that day were paternal. His son, Gabriel had been playing. Yet his presence at the boys’ game was symbolic, given that by nightfall his Ireland squad containing six Blackrock alumni had secured a Six Nations win over Scotland, and hence, back-to-back titles for only the third time in their history.
It’s been an appreciation of the value of the country’s grassroots junior rugby scene to those at the top of Irish rugby which has allowed the Emerald Isle to embarrass England and run them ragged on a fraction of their player base and a fraction of their money, as they did once more on Saturday.
Ireland means what it says when it declares a wish for Six Nations glory. It commits to rugby-playing schools and televises the schoolboy Leinster Senior Cup each year. It feeds players into academy systems run by the four professional teams — Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht. Every Euro is spent with the ultimate aim of making the Ireland team successful.
Blackrock supplied Hugo Keenan, Garry Ringrose, Caelan Doris, Joe McCarthy, Jeremy Loughman and Oli Jager to the win over Scotland on that bright St Patrick’s afternoon last year.
England’s capitulations against Ireland and Scotland in the last fortnight mean their wait for a Six Nations title – never mind a Grand Slam – will stretch to at least seven years
Time and again, the richest rugby union on the planet has produced a sub-standard team
Andy Farrell led Ireland to victory at Twickenham at the weekend. He was criminally shown the door when Eddie Jones arrived as England coach
Ireland might not be the outstanding European side they were 12 months back. They face the same transition every great sporting side must pass through. But they have a rugby union plan and method outstripping anything in evidence at that place in west London laughably called ‘HQ,’ where England’s rugby-going public forked out £200 for standard tickets to see their side eviscerated by Ireland, on Saturday.
The RFU’s £228million of income last year – nearly three times the Irish Rugby Union’s (IRU) revenue – has just delivered up two of the nation’s poorest Six Nations consecutive performances in living memory. And what made a wretched display so much worse on Saturday was the grim of air of resignation around the stadium which Allianz are paying £100m over 10 years to sponsor.
Where, you wanted to know, was the indignant fury of a fanbase who had paid out a fortune to watch such rubbish? Where were the boos which would have greeted an England association football team who had performed as poorly as that? Where was the sense that Borthwick is skating on thin ice here and might actually be in line for the sack?
The rugby union fraternity don’t care too much for comparisons with the round ball game, but can you imagine the reaction had an England football team been humiliated on successive weekends by Scotland and Ireland?
The FA have their critics, yet theirs is a sport where there is the accountability seemingly missing in rugby union. It’s why embarrassments at the hands of Scotland and the Irish teams never happen. The last defeat by a two-goal margin to any of them came at Hampden Park in 1974.
The FA came up with a plan long since for the underperforming England. They reached a World Cup semi-final and successive European Championship finals and became a force in the game.
Other sports have shown a similar vision. For all the failings and indiscipline we have witnessed in Australia this winter, cricket’s ECB at least sought out an identity and ambition for the national Test cricket team. There is no doubt that ‘Bazball’ has invigorated the nation, these past five years.
By the same score, the LTA’s talent identification and player development programmes have contributed to Andy Murray’s emergence and, after him, Emma Raducanu, a player of huge if partially fulfilled promise.
England’s most recent Grand Slam is now 10 years old, in Eddie Jones’ first campaign in charge
Wales, now a symbol of decline and plummeting down the world rankings, have won a Six Nations title more recently than England and have twice as many Grand Slams since 2000
There is every good reason for England’s rugby union team to bring just as much success as all our other national sporting teams. They are being asked for superiority over a far smaller number of rugby-playing nations. Though the size of France and Italy’s populations exceed England’s, IRU data from 2011 shows the number of male rugby players in England is greater than that of any of the other Six Nations participants.
When you weigh up the competitors’ respective riches, England should be involved in a straight Six Nations shootout with France every year, yet they have not won that title for six years and given what we have witnessed these past two weeks, Italy are now arguably slight favourites to beat them in Rome a week on Saturday.
The table of Grand Slam wins since 2003 reads: Wales 4, France 3, Ireland 3, England 1. Given all that wealth for such pitiful reward, our rugby union team really are the biggest serial failures in English sport. It’s nothing less than a scandal.
The success of England’s Under-20s – beating France to win the World Rugby Under-20 Championship in 2024 with a team which included Henry Pollock – suggests there are pathways and promise.
But the RFU are incapable of seeing and seizing upon the presence of excellent rugby league coaching talent which has been there, right under their nose, but lost to other nations. Some of rugby league’s brightest coaches have gone.
Farrell was criminally shown the door when Eddie Jones arrived in 2015 and is committed to Ireland until at least the 2027 World Cup. There is also Shaun Edwards, the France defence coach whose appearance to conduct post-match interviews in his broad Lancashire accent after each great win for Les Bleus laughs in the face of the governing body which ought to be employing him.
England have a former rugby league man in Borthwick’s assistant Kevin Sinfield, of course, but he doesn’t hold a candle to Farrell and Edwards – giant rugby figures whose presence elsewhere is currently making the RFU look ridiculous.
Borthwick will, no doubt, point to the second and third position of England’s last two World Cups and the 12-match winning run which saw the All Blacks beaten last autumn, though so would any coach who had won nothing.
England’s cricketers have won three World Cups since our rugby or football teams managed one
Our football team may not have the trophies, but face far greater competition in the world’s most popular sport and have made the last two European finals
When it comes to recruiting individuals to lead, in the way that Sir Clive Woodward did, ’Headquarters’ have simply not picked winners. After Stuart Lancaster, a decent man who walked around the Pennyhill training base with a Collins A4 diary under his arm but paid the price for not being ruthless enough, all we got was the crash and burn and raging ego of Jones. Another failure.
It was on St Patrick’s Day weekend three years ago that Farrell delivered a rallying cry to his Ireland players before sending them out to beat England and clinch a Grand Slam. His oration was captured in the Netflix series Full Contact and surpassed any coaching talk we heard across the episodes.
‘It doesn’t get any better, lads,’ Farrell told them that day. ‘And you know what this day should feel like? It should feel like the best day of your life. We should feel so privileged to be in this room.’
The effect was spine-tingling and the players did not let him down. As they stagger though the boglands of failure, England could learn something from a man and a leader like that.