With the first round of Six Nations 2021 complete, former England skipper Martin Corry returns to Expert Witness to examine England’s sub-par performance against Scotland and to look forward to the match against Italy this weekend.

Rush of blood

Scotland effectively derailed England’s Grand Slam at the first hurdle this season, winning 11-6 in a titanic display of gain line aggression, intensity and application last Saturday.

For Eddie Jones it was yet another slow Six Nations start, and many believe it to be a loss that has decimated his planning for the season with a performance that brings under scrutiny both selection policy and tactics.

However, former England back-row Corry believes that England’s track record under Jones is well in credit and that there’s absolutely no need to panic.

“It’s fair to say that Scotland played at an intensity that was absolutely phenomenal,” he said. “They rattled England big time, refused to give us any ‘easy outs’, denying any foothold in the game and they raised their emotional effort to impressive heights.

“The English way is to impose a big forward-based game, using power to tie in defences, but with a combination of the Scottish gain line intensity, a litany of early and silly technical infringements and a rush of blood from Billy Vunipola that saw a yellow after referee Andrew Brace had issued a final warning for consistent infringements, all in all, it smacked of a team that seemed off their game, underprepared in terms of match time and training time that met a very good opponent who were at the top of their form.

“There’s still a lot of noise in the media about the kicking game and the lack of ambition to run from England but, on a day where Hamish Watson, Matt Fagerson and Jonny Gray were exceptional at the breakdown, the ball England had was absolutely glacially slow. On the flip side, that same collision dominance gave the Scots much quicker ball at the base which in turn gave the likes of Finn Russell and the outstanding Stuart Hogg a platform from which to play. You can only execute tactics with the speed of ball you have and when England’s was as slow as it was, it’s very hard to play attacking and running rugby from it.”

Fix you

“As usual, there’s clamour from all parts this week to tear up the teamsheet and to throw away the tactics we used but that, in my opinion, is a knee jerk reaction and one that doesn’t pay due respect to the great record England have had under Eddie Jones and their achievements last season,” Corry added.

“This is easily fixable and some calm introspection is required to look at the preparation, examine the injury list and to select well for the next round. International rugby is now of a standard where any of the top eight or nine sides can beat each other on their day. There are very few easy Test matches and if you’re less than 100% in any way, then you leave yourself exposed to losses like this. The return is disproportional; if you’re five per cent off, then you’re half the side in terms of threat.

“Let’s just get back to the question of intensity; when England are at their best, they’re playing like they did against New Zealand in 2019 – fast, committed gain line rugby, played with close off-loads and with power runners. Intensity is a mindset and when you’re faced with the challenge of New Zealand, there’s a natural and huge motivation to get those emotions up to their height. The real skill of a coach is to capture that moment of high performance and repeat it again and again and that’s almost a superhuman ask.

“You have to use those moments as your default setting and if you fail to get into that high performance mindset, you’ll get peaks and troughs, which clearly happened with England. This is predominantly the same team that played in 2019 and you don’t become a bad side overnight; we also need to give Scotland credit for getting to that intensity mindset where we perhaps didn’t- they did, in fact, play like we did in that New Zealand game and that’s to their credit.”