The incoming head coach has all the right qualities required to rescue a dire situation as long as he can stay true to his own instincts.
MARTIN, this is horrible. You have to act. I realise that I am buying into your least favourite part of your legend - that all you have to do is say a few words, or glower, and everything gets better. But it is horrible. England are rubbish. They have lost so much, and in particular, they have lost their honesty with themselves.
And please be yourself when you start officially on July 1. Don’t come in and be urbane or glib or statesmanlike. If you are yourself, then you will not become a martyr to excuses. England have been generally catastrophic for five years but in all the media conferences in all that time, including the one after yesterday’s horrendous debacle, all I have heard is about 20 minutes per conference of bleating and clutching at silly straws. I have hardly heard one coach put his hands up and say that the England team were dire, so it must follow that I was dire too.
If you are yourself, you will cut through all the rubbish. You will not suffer fools and you will take the necessary hard decisions. Your strength will ensure that you put the current coaching regime of John Wells, Mike Ford, Jon Callard and Graham Rowntree and all the rest of the back-up team under the most baleful and unforgiving microscope. Your sense of what is right will mean that you discard anyone, be they friends or enemies, who you know in your heart is not right.
Indeed, I would seriously consider beginning with a clean slate because the current England coaching set-up worries me. It worried me under Brian Ashton and it has worried me under Rob Andrew these past few weeks. If you see, say, Wasps play, under Ian McGeechan and Shaun Edwards, you can see what they are driving at, even if they lose. Frankly, watching England in the past two weeks, I simply cannot fathom what they have been working on in their coaching sessions. Brian Smith must come in, but there must be freshness elsewhere too.
And if you are yourself, you will be endlessly pragmatic and live in the moment. Please God, you will remember that England have an under20 team to develop youngsters. England’s policy of late, to bypass players of experience and proven craft in favour of punts on youth, has been resoundingly unsuccessful and a total and myopic disgrace. Last night, Andrew told us to go easy on Danny Care, who struggled a little in the Test. “He is a young man playing his first Test in New Zealand,” Andrew said. Who’s fault is that, Rob? You chose him, and you had alternatives.
If you are yourself, if you stay in the moment, then there will be no future, only the present. You will reject with the old ferocity this desperate idea that England sporting life is a rehearsal, that everything is a preparation for some indeterminate point in the future. As a player, you absolutely refused to look one millisecond beyond the next game, and that concentration helped you to be focused, to be at your best, to win.
If you are yourself, you will bring rigour and discipline back to the team. One senior member of this touring party bemoaned at the end of last week what he saw as a “lack of discipline” about operations under Andrew. He meant a lack of discipline in terms of preparation and focus, but he could just as easily have been referring to the alleged silly behaviour, to the childish messing about, which would be anathema to you.
And if you are yourself, you will bring back the air of agonised devastation in the event of a defeat. It is simply not good enough for youngsters to come on television after England have lost, beaming all over their faces because they have won a cap, and perhaps contributed something to the losing cause. Maybe the losing habit has become pernicious, but English defeats seem to me to be far more readily accepted than they ever should be.
You might even give England an inspirational leader, something they have lacked during the worthy but nonvolcanic captaincies of Phil Vickery, Steve Borthwick and others. It is time to use your own instincts about leadership – not simply to find someone in your own image. James Haskell may be blond and brash, while you are dark and terse. But it is time to find someone to give real inspiration and passion, and time to stop passing the post through on the basis of Buggins’s turn. Surely, too, you will follow your instincts and choose players of proven, pragmatic achievement and also treasure those with extra skills. You will not be succoured into believing for one moment that you can choose dancing prancers who do not have power to add to their ephemera.
At least England’s weak areas lie where you were strong. They have been underpowered in the second row ever since you retired and what better man could there be to drag forward the next generation? You can provide a finishing school which all the junior teams, all the academies and all the other routes could only dream of. You may not have any coaching badges, but what is coaching alongside the ability to galvanise an individual?
Please hurry. Please divorce yourself, without declaring that you are doing so, from all the endless reporting lines which tend to strangle Twickenham. Please do not bother with consensus. Please be a sole leader. Please don’t bother to ingratiate, and do not worry for a second about your popularity and your legend. If you are yourself, then England will achieve results to burnish the legend.
And finally, please do not talk about building on the legacy which you have been left. There is no legacy. On July 1, a new agreement between Union and clubs comes in. More important, you come in, too. But the truth is that after five years of shambles, bumbling, ludicrous selections and dishonesty, you are effectively starting from scratch.
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