adrenalinxx posted:
stevocod posted:
You said they beat Ireland once and then you said they lost to them!!! No disrespect to Scottish and Italian rugby teams, they are hardly the leading nations in the six nations are they?
They played Ireland once and won and then played Ireland again and lost, the Ireland game they lost was the only game they lost on their Spring Tour 2006 they also played and beat South Africa more recently but then again so did England.
You could say that England’s poor form in RU is due to coming up against good sides, where perhaps the Australians have played slightly easier opposition but it still shows that England is not competing at the highest level.
I'm not a big RU fan but as was pointed out earlier in the topic England RU are the World Champions but many of the World Cup winning team retired or have been dropped and the players coming through have not been able to continue the form, which could suggest that the players coming through are not good enough unlike Australia who seem to have a good system of bringing new players in and maintaining consistency.
Well that's abit harsh because the England RU team is going throught transition and very similar to Wigan whereby there were many injuries to experienced players and many youngsters playing.
Along with that, the club/country contractual issue of players only playing a certain number of Autumn internationals which fragment a solid consistent team selection and team moves are hard to read as many have never played together much before.
You say some players dropped from the World Cup winning team (well that accounts for two - Thompson and Tindall) the rest have retired.
Also England coming up against good sides, fair enough Argentina they pushed the All blacks and French close twice this year, but South Africa away from home are in one of the worst runs ever and we had the pyschological edge over them after the first win. In the second we should have killed them off but the inability of poor coaching within the RFU and new combinations after each game doesn't help the situation.
This alone demeans the value of building a national team structure. In International Rugby (League and Union), you don't have much time to prepare like at club level and must make use of the limited time to build structure and bring in new players gradually and individually so all set pieces are understood and players in the build up to the World Cup were not taken there.
Before England won the world cup they had a more impressive Grand Slam in my opinion and the likes of James Simpson-Daniel who should have gone and he was the future as well. We were lucky (given the current RFU structure) to win the World Cup and if this establishment remains in place we won't win it again.
IMO Australia are not near challenging NZ in the world cup and NZ, Ireland and Wales are probably ahead of them right now.