Nick Cain looks ahead to the 2015 World Cup showdown between England, Wales and Australia

We are six months closer to the 2015 World Cup Pool of Pain, and the Lions victory over Australia provides a natural watershed from which to assess the state of England and Wales and Australia, the three protagonists.
Just over two years from now the 2015 hosts, England, reigning Six Nations champions Wales, and two-time world champions
Australia, find themselves shoved into the biggest early stage bear-pit in World Cup history, with one of them doomed to an ignominious exit from Pool A.
An immediate ready-reckoner would suggest that it is Australia who are the most vulnerable following their record third Test defeat by the Lions, while Wales, who provided ten of the starting 15 which routed the Wallabies, appear to be the Northern Hemisphere’s most likely 2015 World Cup winners.
The Welsh credentials only get stronger when you add Warren Gatland, the coaching mastermind behind the Lions triumph, to their roster.
However, despite the body blow dealt to Australia by the Lions, the overriding feeling is that they are badly clawed rather than mortally injured. Added to that, the speed with which they cauterised the wound, sacking Robbie Deans and installing Reds coach Ewen McKenzie in the Wallaby post, was a salutary lesson to the RFU in how to get the job done.
There was none of the tortuous bureaucratic process that cranks into motion whenever Twickenham hires or fires a head coach – witness the convolutions over Martin Johnson’s post 2011 World Cup departure. Instead, the ends, i.e. a losing Lions tour, justified the means, and Deans was told by the ARU chief executive, Bill Pulver, that his six-year tenure as Wallaby coach was over within 48 hours of the final whistle at the ANZ Stadium in Sydney.
Despite Australia’s coaching change, it is England who are in the greatest state of flux. Stuart Lancaster did the right thing by bringing in new blood in Argentina, but how much the England head coach learned from the exercise is debatable.
This is mainly because Argentina, deprived of their European-based core players, were disappointingly weak.
Asked what England should be looking for from the two-Test tour, Sir Clive Woodward offered this opinion from the commentators booth before the 32-3 first Test win in Salta: “You want to put pressure on them (the England players), not to take it off them. You want to see who can handle it.”

Drawing a bead on who can handle it was not easy given England’s overwhelming set- piece superiority. This was highlighted by Argentina back-pedalling at the scrum and losing nine of their own lineouts in the first Test, and then conceding two scrum penalty tries in the 51-26 second Test romp in Buenos Aires.
Any analysis of England’s two victories on Argentine soil must be tempered because of the failure of the Pumas to live up to their tradition of power at the set-piece and the maul.
Irrespective, forwards coach Rob Baxter deserves credit for the ruthless way that his pack prosecuted their advantage. The Bath front row duo of tighthead David Wilson and hooker Rob Webber threw down the gauntlet to their rivals, and the Leicester pairing of Dan Cole and Tom Youngs will not be able to rest easy despite returning from Australia as Test Lions.
Another bonus was the blooding of Matt Kvesic, and early signs that he has the strength over the ball, the workrate (29 tackles in the first Test), the mobility, and support play to develop into a genuine Test openside.
England’s back play was mixed despite an impressive 11 try tally for the series, with four in the first Test and seven in the second. What was less impressive was the number of chances the backs squandered against limited opposition.
While Billy Twelvetrees’ strong first Test showing exempted him from the criticism, and there were moments of individual excellence – especially Kyle Eastmond’s solo second Test try – there was too much inaccuracy. Some of the backline passing and support play was pedestrian, and that, along with a recurrent failing to pick damaging lines of running, would have seen the England backs struggle against better defences.
Lancaster and his coaches believe that a less direct style than the one employed by the Lions, with the breach being made further out towards the touchline after multiple phases, can be highly effective. The danger is that against good defences – which Argentina’s was not –England become too lateral, or too dependent on the power of Manu Tuilagi.
England would benefit by borrowing from the Lions and Wales and having a direct, aggressive round-the-corner component to their tactical approach. Lancaster requires forwards and inside backs, and wings cutting infield, who continually get over the advantage line.
Unlike the Welsh, and the Australians, too many English carriers – with forwards especially culpable – have a tendency to get buried without crossing the gain-line.
Thankfully, their new Lions luminaries, Alex Corbisiero and Tom Youngs, are exceptions to the rule, as are Ben Morgan and Joe Launchbury.
That at least gives England something to work with, and to work on, but they are a long way behind Wales – and Australia – when it comes to knowing their best combinations. This autumn will give Lancaster a clearer register of where he is, not least when they play Australia at Twickenham.
One of the most staggering changes in Australia over the last couple of decades is that it has gone from being the embodiment of chauvinism, ‘the land of the six o’clock swill’, to one of the most PC countries on the planet. This was reflected in the Deans sacking, with his fiercest critics falling over themselves to give him a man-hug.
Deans was hailed as the nation’s greatest ever non-Aussie coach – not difficult given that he was the first – but the hard-bitten reality is that Australians wanted one of their own back in charge.

The Wallabies see themselves as the greatest swashbucklers in the world game, and Deans, the stubborn Kiwi with the method-driven Crusaders pedigree, was not showing them the mirror image that they wanted. The same applied to McKenzie’s rival for the post, Jake White. South Africa’s 2007 World Cup-winning coach has transformed the Brumbies from no-hopers to Super 15 contenders after 18 months in charge, but the strong set-piece, fierce defence, and big kick-chase game he favours attracts Wallabies fans even less than the ‘Dingo’ Deans way.
McKenzie, on the other hand, is a 1991 World Cup-winning Aussie prop, and a natural choice to take the squad back to the ‘Wallaby Way’. In essence, we are talking about a form of total rugby which, while it has structure, also depends on players having the adaptability and flair to play what is in front of them.
Given McKenzie’s record as one of the best tightheads in Australian annals, it is also likely that top of his to-do list will be to tighten up the bolts on a scrum platform eventually wrecked by the Lions, with Corbisiero, Richard Hibbard and Adam Jones to the fore.
Having also been Quade Cooper’s main minder at the Reds it is also odds-on that the quixotic fly half – discarded by Deans after describing his camp as “toxic” – will be rehabilitated in the Australian squad for the forthcoming Southern Hemisphere Rugby Championship.
Dean’s decision to play James O’Connor at fly-half against the Lions, after only a handful of games in the position for the Rebels, was one of the biggest miscalculations of the series – and McKenzie has a chance to put that right immediately by including Cooper in his plans for the tournament.
McKenzie’s Wallaby coaching tenure starts with a double header against New Zealand, with the opener in Sydney on August 17 and the return a week later in Wellington. Baptisms of fire do not come much hotter, but there is a groundswell of early goodwill towards
McKenzie, so, unless Australia are dire, he will get a rebuilding allowance for the duration of the tournament.
McKenzie’s credentials from his time with the Reds suggests that he will chop and change much less than Deans, and there is no question that if he gets his forward base right, Australia have match-winners almost everywhere you look in the backline.
Whether it is the playmaking axis at half-back of Will Genia and Cooper, the midfield flair of Adam Ashley-Cooper, O’Connor and Kurtley Beale, or the strike running of Israel Folau, Nick Cummins, Digby Ioane, or Luke Morahan, there are strike runners coming from all angles.
It would be surprising if Sekope Kepu does not supplant Ben Alexander at tighthead, because he is a stronger, steadier anchor. The likely return of hooker Tatafu Polota-Nau from a broken arm for the Championship also beefs up the Wallaby front row, and with the massive Sitaleki Timani likely to be restored at lock after recovering from a broken thumb, the front five has more power than it did against the Lions.
Ben Mowen’s breakthrough as a Test blindside or No.8 against the Lions is another plus for McKenzie, filling the hole left by Scott Higginbotham, who is not expected to return from shoulder reconstruction until early in 2014.
David Pocock should be available at openside again for the Grand Slam autumn tour of Britain and Ireland, but in the interim Michael Hooper and Liam Gill provide McKenzie with impressive cover at No.7.
Forwards of that calibre coming back on stream will ensure that Australia are highly combative by the World Cup, and McKenzie has been given plenty of warning that England and Wales will be gunning for the Aussie scrum again, following the Lions third Test success.
Ironically, given the way that Adam Jones enhanced his credentials as the best tighthead in the Test arena during the series, the scrum will be the chief area of concern for Gatland as he charts a course to turn Wales into world champions.
At 32, Jones was in his propping pomp during the Lions tour, but, with hundreds more scrums on the clock by 2015 he will be deep in veteran territory – and the concern for Gatland is that there is no one of his calibre coming through as a replacement.
Scott Andrews of the Cardiff Blues is the next No.3 in line, but he will have to negotiate a steep climb to be ready to deputise for Jones two years from now.
The ageing process is also chipping away at loosehead, where Gethin Jenkins will, like Jones, be 34 at the next World Cup. That makes it imperative for Gatland to build front row depth, with only hooker Hibbard still in his prime in 2015.
The other Welsh option is to search high and low for breezeblock imports with Welsh grannies or grandads, because the three-year residency route is already too late.
Wales have seen enough of the difficulties Australia faced against the Lions to know that however much class they have in the back five of their scrum, or superstars like Leigh Halfpenny and George North in their backline, they are in danger of being hostages to fortune without a decent scrum.
However, if Gatland can solve his prop dilemma there is no disputing that the array of seasoned talent he has at his disposal, from his two Lions captains Sam Warburton and Alun Wyn Jones all the way through to Jamie Roberts and Jonathan Davies, leaves Wales best placed to escape the Pool of Pain.