Nick Cain uncovers the ticking time bomb of Red Rose tour to New Zealand
If England are to win the Six Nations title, or, heaven forbid, secure a first Grand Slam in ten years, victory over the French is non-negotiable. And then, after the joust for second division supremacy, come the All Blacks. Wave after wave of them.
Lancaster’s lads face a three-Test tour of New Zealand in June, with the Test venues, though yet to be confirmed, likely to be Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland. There will also be one midweek game against a Super 15 franchise between the second and third Tests – but by then England could already be all washed-up.
You might argue successfully that it’s overkill for England to embark on a Lions-style three-Test tour the summer before the 2015 World Cup, but overall there’s nothing shocking about the itinerary. What is shocking is the staggering ineptitude of the RFU, a governing body prepared to handicap their own team against the world champions simply to meet the unfair demands of the tours schedule mapped out by the IRB.
How else could the RFU possibly have got themselves into a fix which dictates that England will almost certainly be forced to play the first Test without their strongest team?
The lack of professionalism beggars belief, but that’s what Lancaster is faced with purely because the opening Test of the three match series, on June 7, is a week after the Premiership Final. This renders players from the two competing clubs unavailable for England duty due to lack of preparation, flight recovery time and rest protocols.
When you are playing the world champions on their own turf the playing field is not so much level as something resembling the gradient to Everest base camp. That is why, if England are to have any chance of even a qualified success in New Zealand – and by that I mean a
2-1 series defeat – you would expect the RFU’s organisation of the tour to be flawless. Instead, it is feckless to the point of stupidity.
It is a given that winning the opening Test of a series in the Southern Hemisphere, whether it’s England or the Lions, is absolutely crucial to your hopes of survival, let alone success. When you are facing a side of New Zealand’s calibre it is multiplied to the power of ten.
Like any team, the All Blacks are at their most vulnerable in their first Test of a new season after a lay-off. Although they will be match-hardened from their Super 15 exertions, there is always the danger that well-worn parts might not function as well as they did six months earlier at Twickenham.
Yet, instead of England being primed to throw everything at New Zealand in the first Test by going at them with their best line-up, they will be in a position to field only a shadow side.
Imagine if it’s a Premiership Final involving Northampton, Leicester or Saracens. No Dylan Hartley, Alex Corbisiero, Courtney Lawes, Tom Wood, Lee Dickson, Ben Foden, Luther Burrell or Sam Dickinson. No Dan Cole, Tom or Ben Youngs, Geoff Parling, Toby Flood, Manu Tuilagi. Or no Mako or Billy Vunipola, no Owen Farrell, Brad Barritt, Alex Goode, Chris Ashton, or Joel Tomkins.
Whichever two teams of those three you pick, it means that England will be missing almost half their match 23 against New Zealand last weekend.
The RFU wallahs need only take a quick, painful glance in the rear-view mirror for a reminder of New Zealand’s reputation as the graveyard of Northern Hemisphere aspirations – not least England’s.
The first of the recent black spots was the ‘Duracell Bunny’ tour of 2008 under the aegis of Rob Andrew, when a struggling side lost 2-0 and returned home with their reputation tarnished after an unproven sex scandal was put in the public domain by the Auckland police. Yet, the lessons had not been learned, and in the 2011 World Cup it got worse with bar room antics in Queenstown, a discredited sex abuse ‘sting’, and Tuilagi’s plunge into Auckland
Harbour, evidence of a team which lacked the rigour or focus to be true contenders.
The post-mortem that engulfed the last World Cup squad eventually saw Lancaster ushered in as head coach, but, incredibly, the RFU appear already to have forgotten just how difficult it is to go to New Zealand and win. Instead, they have agreed a lunatic schedule this summer which could demolish the building blocks put in place over the last couple of seasons.
Privately it would be surprising if Lancaster and his assistant coaches, Andy Farrell and Graham Rowntree, were not seething. They ought to be, because, despite all the brave words about pitching yourselves against the best and learning from it, an emphatic three-nil series whitewash in New Zealand could undermine confidence more than build it.
Lancaster ought to prevail on Ian Ritchie, the RFU’s chief executive, to tell whoever agreed the schedule at the RFU to sort out the mess of their own making. He should insist that the first thing they should do is inform the IRB, and New Zealand, to downgrade the June 7 fixture from Test status and give it a more accurate billing of All Blacks v England Saxons, because that’s what it is.
If New Zealand want to play NZ Maori or NZ ‘A’ against the Saxons, fine, but don’t call it a Test, because the number of players unavailable to England renders that null and void.
Lancaster should be unbending, and accept an itinerary of only two Tests against New Zealand, to be played on June 14 and June 21. That way he would have a full strength side for the opening Test, and a chance, should they ambush New Zealand, of at least a squared series. The bonus would be that England would then meet the All Blacks for the autumn decider at Twickenham.
That is a strategy in England’s interests. Playing the ‘first Test’ with a cobbled together side full of reserves is not, and a three-Test drubbing beckons because the All Blacks invariably get better as the series progresses.
What this sorry story also highlights is that the IRB should be made accountable for the mess they are making of international scheduling. This summer England, France (three Tests v Australia), Wales (three Tests v South Africa) and Ireland (two Tests v Argentina) are being pressed into playing bogus Test matches with weakened teams because the IRB insists on seeing May 31-June 1 – the weekend when the Premiership, Top14 and Pro12 finals have traditionally been held in the professional era – as the first weekend of their summer tour window. This enables a round of the Super 15 to be squeezed into the last weekend in June, with that sub-international SANZAR competition taking priority over international matches.
England find themselves in an identical situation to the one France experienced for the first Test of their tour to New Zealand last summer following the Top 14 final. For the record, France lost all three Tests on that tour, and were beaten again by the All Blacks at the Stade de France a fortnight ago.
It’s time for Lancaster to take a stand, and for Warren Gatland, Philippe Saint-Andre, and Joe Schmidt to join him, because otherwise their teams are on a hiding to nothing.
