The English winter is closing in and at Twickenham the temperature is dropping fast. This week, they didn’t miss the last-minute kick and it didn’t make any difference. This week, Marcus Smith stayed on the pitch and that didn’t fix it either.
England lost, again. The three before it were all to the All Blacks, but this one was to an Australian team who are ninth in the world rankings and had lost five of their past six games coming into this fixture. It happened even though England had a 12-point lead at the end of the first quarter and a two-point lead at the end of the fourth one.
Or near enough to the end of it that a couple of the England players started celebrating victory after the restart when they thought they had won a late penalty that would end the game. The referee, Ben O’Keeffe, disagreed and before England knew it, Len Ikitau had slipped a brilliant offload to Max Jorgensen and Australia were away.
It was a hell of a match, a real rip-roaring, seesawing, two-hour set-to. The lead changed hands four times in the second half. England won it, lost it, won it back, lost it again, came back one last time, and found, in the end, they had somehow been defeated 42-37.
The 80,000 inside the ground got every penny of their money’s worth out of it, even at the prices Twickenham charges for tickets. The question is whether, once the exhilaration has worn off, the entertainment will be enough for the rugby public to cut the team, and Steve Borthwick, some slack for the fact they lost.
England were red-hot for the first 20 minutes when they smashed their way into a 15-3 lead through two bullocking tries by Chandler Cunningham-South. It came so easily that you wonder if some of the team switched off in those moments because they were stone cold for the 40 minutes that came right after it, when Australia outscored them 25-3.
It was as bad a passage of play as the team have turned in since Borthwick took charge and it killed whatever swelling momentum they had gathered in those opening moments. It’s an old rule that you should never give a Wallaby an even chance, and England allowed them plenty.
Borthwick said their rhythm was disrupted by a long break in play while Tom Curry was being treated for a head injury and a couple of head injury assessments on Immanuel Feyi-Waboso and Ollie Lawrence. It did not help, either, that they were caught short by Tate McDermott, who came on as a blood injury replacement for Jake Gordon at scrum-half and made a number of telling breaks during his short stint on the field.
England pulled themselves together again, at 28-18 down. They played the large part of the rest of the game in Australia’s half, right where they needed to be. Ollie Sleightholme scored a superb double, which made it 30-28 with 12 minutes left to play.
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From then on, it was all about the end game. The fans started booing when they saw Borthwick was going to bring on Harry Randall and George Ford, but stopped again when they saw that this week Ford was replacing George Furbank and Smith was moving to full-back. Which was an improvement. They were a lot better than they had been against New Zealand the week previous.
Smith and Maro Itoje drove the team forwards and delivered more of the leadership they needed in those moments. But there were so many errors in among it all, the most telling of them the missed pass that Ford threw into Lawrence’s back, which allowed Andrew Kellaway to break away down field to score, and then the failure to secure the restart after Smith’s last conversion, which allowed Jorgensen the chance to score in the corner.
England looked, in those moments, the “young, developing” team Borthwick described them as in his programme notes. But the truth is, they are really not. There is plenty of experience in this team and they have had more than long enough together. But at the end of it, they have got nothing much to show for it except for a handful of losses in games they probably ought to have won.
England are on a run of four straight defeats and are staring down a match against the world champions, South Africa, back here on Saturday. They are under heavy pressure now, one more loss this autumn would leave them in a desperate place before next year’s Six Nations, which begins with matches against Ireland and France. The hardest game of the year is shaping up to be the most important, too.