Jeremy Guscott: Lancaster’s dilemma is who plays 10, Farrell or Burns?

Having watched the best team in the world, New Zealand, beat the second best, South Africa, 38-27 in a humdinger of a match in Jo’burg, my first thought is what are the chances of England beating the All Blacks this November as they comfortably did last season?
Last autumn England beat them in one of the best games I’ve ever seen England play. It was a near all round perfect performance, one that if we are brutally honest the team haven’t come close to matching since.
What’s changed in that time that allowed England to nearly lose to Italy at Twickenham and get so outgunned at the Millennium in the Six Nations decider?
If anything the players will have been better prepared and more experienced, yet they couldn’t back up the performance of four months earlier.
If you’ve done it once, why don’t you want to keep on doing it? Why do you suddenly stop putting in performances like that?
New Zealand are the number one team in the world – but if you’ve just found the formula to beating them once, you can do it again.
The big difference being between the best, and the consistently best – i.e. New Zealand – is their ability to mentally tune-in to perform under the extreme pressure and expectation.
“I hate losing more than they like winning” is a line from the film Moneyball. It’s the mantra of true winners.
It’s clear that a big advantage New Zealand have over most international teams is if they replace a player, either because of injury or a dip in form, the player coming in fits in like clockwork. Nothing seems to change or be affected team-wise by the change in personnel.
If I look at England, and take the inside-centres as an example, Brad Barritt, Billy Twelvetrees and Kyle Eastmond are completely different players. Expecting a team to be consistent and effective when you have big differences in style, approach and mentality is pie in the sky.
The same issues exist at fly-half. Owen Farrell, Freddie Burns and Toby Flood all approach and think about the game in different ways – so, unless each of them has the confidence to run the show their own way, they are attempting to play to an England coaching template.
New Zealand have a much more effective pattern than England, and everyone else, because whether, Dan Carter, Aaron Cruden or Beauden Barratt play fly-half, the pattern is pretty much the same, even though each of them might execute it slightly differently.
When England beat NZ last season it was rugby poetry, it was wonderful to watch, every player in sync, reading and anticipating each other’s moves. If England could match that standard of play every time they went out they would be vying to be the best team in the world.
The differences in the playing styles of the top teams in the Aviva Premiership make it very difficult every time the England squad go into camp – whereas in New Zealand, with a more centralised system, and all the provincial coaches using the All Black pattern, it is much easier.
The England management have to de-programme each player and get them back thinking about the international team’s pattern.
Stuart Lancaster has had the squad for 19 internationals, there are only around 25 more games until the start of RWC 2015, and his team’s development has to see them score more tries.
If a team scores three tries in a game I cannot see them losing many matches – and that has to be Stuart Lancaster’s team goal, weather permitting.
England scored three tries when beating New Zealand last season with Owen Farrell playing at fly-half. For Farrell to remain England’s best option of scoring tries the English pack have to play that well in every game.
Saracens score tries with Farrell at fly-half because they have a more powerful pack than most Premiership clubs, but England cannot generally achieve that because their pack is not yet more powerful than those of most of their tier one rivals.
That alone leaves Lancaster with a massive dilemma. Can he leave Owen Farrell out of his team? Can the Saracens No.10 develop a running game in time, or should he bring in Freddie Burns now?
Can Graham Rowntree cultivate an English pack of forwards mean and powerful enough to demolish the New Zealand or South Africa pack anytime and every time?
Having beaten New Zealand once under Stuart Lancaster in such beautiful fashion, the bar was set high.
But will the players in Lancaster’s squad now, or those to be drafted in, reach those heights again this season against an All Black team which has just put five tries past the Springboks on their own patch?