The Breakdown | Fast-paced, risk-taking Prem is a blueprint for England

Top-level rugby is fast becoming a different sport and finalists illustrate the domestic talent Borthwick needs to harness

For anyone who hasn’t yet watched them, the weekend’s two English Prem semi-finals were brilliant adverts for the sport. The game between Northampton and Leicester fizzed with speed and quality passing. The following day’s encounter between Bath and Exeter involved one of the best fightbacks and tautest finishes imaginable.

The upshot is a Northampton v Exeter final this Saturday, a showpiece with the potential to be just as absorbing. Henry Pollock v Greg Fisilau, Tommy Freeman v Henry Slade, Fin Smith v Harvey Skinner … not to mention two intelligent English coaching teams led, respectively, by Phil Dowson and Sam Vesty, and Rob Baxter and Dave Walder. If the Rugby Football Union is pondering future homegrown alternatives to Steve Borthwick there are some increasingly strong candidates.

But hang on a second. The future has to start now. There is a World Cup next year at which Borthwick’s England have to show the very best of themselves. There is some magnificent young talent in English rugby – it would be utterly bonkers not to trust it.

Take Northampton’s sixth try, an absolute beauty in which Tom Pearson and Fraser Dingwall exchanged passes before George Furbank reappeared on the inside to give a scoring pass to his equally alert scrum-half Archie McParland. Stick them in Toulouse jerseys and everyone would be gushing about French flair, casually excellent support play and total rugby.

Cue the naysayers who argue that transferring this kind of enterprise to the international stage is impractical. Defences are better, the margins tighter, the stakes higher. Which is true to a certain degree. The Test arena is a step up from the club game and World Cups, in particular, are rarely won by the prettiest rugby.

But that kind of traditional thinking ignores present-day trends. Top-level rugby is fast becoming a different sport. As Bath found on Saturday teams who shut up shop are increasingly vulnerable. At 26-10 ahead entering the second half there should only have been one winner. Instead Bath tightened up, their energy levels drained down the plughole and they stopped playing.

It was reminiscent in some ways of how England plodded through the middle chunk of the Six Nations. Structured, controlled, clunky … it all appeared distinctly outdated compared to the approach of other more enterprising teams. “Rugby in general is going that way and we probably realised that a little bit too late,” said Jamie George, talking to his former England teammates Ben Youngs and Dan Cole on their Love of Rugby podcast.

How good to hear someone in the England camp publicly acknowledging the obvious. And the penny, in fairness, did eventually drop in the form of a sharply improved performance against France in Paris. The question is whether Borthwick’s England can now reproduce that free-wheeling rugby when the weight of expectation is heavier or the opposition forwards are pawing the turf, starting in Johannesburg against the world champion Springboks on 4 July?

This may be the area in which last weekend’s semi-finals can best inform the Borthwick project. Fin Smith, the Saints and England fly-half, was particularly insightful on Friday night regarding Northampton’s determination not to be hampered by nerves. “You can still go and play a certain style of rugby if you’re brave enough,” said Smith. “Just because it’s a final doesn’t mean you have to be cagey.”

For that to become possible, though, everyone has to buy in. There will inevitably be the odd mistake; not every offload will stick. There are loads of people, too, who bang on about the DNA of English rugby being based around forward dominance and/or playing the percentages at the exclusion of everything else. OK, but what if the rest of the sport has moved on?

Better, surely, to try to replicate the can-do mindset of their top clubs. Imagine an England starting pack this summer containing George Martin, Alex Coles, Ollie Chessum, Ben Earl and Pollock, who had perhaps the most impressive game of his still-fledgling career against Tigers. Start Smith, Freeman and Furbank against the Boks as well.

Yes, it clearly matters who starts in the front row, with this Friday’s preparatory game against a French XV in Vannes sure to be instructive on that front.

Either way the more crucial it becomes that Borthwick selects proactively at No 9. To win the World Cup a go-faster England require a running nine – or, ideally, two of them – with genuine vision. There are better box-kickers than McParland but his club relationship with Pollock and Smith is a plus. To get ahead of the curve between now and the World Cup, England will need to take a few calculated risks.

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This is an extract from our weekly rugby union email, the Breakdown. To subscribe just visit this page and follow the instructions.

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