When the final whistle sounds France and England will look back on this year’s Six Nations championship and wish they could edit the narrative ever so slightly. Barring a spectacular Irish collapse against Scotland in Dublin, this edition of “Le Crunch” will in effect be a shootout for second place, hardly the grand finale that either team or the tournament organisers ideally visualised.
It remains, nevertheless, a psychologically significant contest for all involved. France, having fallen short at their own World Cup, have been searching for their best form and an upbeat end to their campaign would ease the pressure on their head coach, Fabien Galthié. The visitors, similarly, are keen not to wave adieu to the feelgood momentum generated by their stirring win over Ireland last Saturday.
Visible week-to-week improvement remains every coach’s dream and England, in particular, have not recently been renowned for backing up big wins against decent teams. The most glaring example was in 2019 when they delivered a stellar performance to knock out the All Blacks in the World Cup semi-final, only to be swept away by South Africa’s scrum power in the final.
That painful lesson still lingers in the mind of Jamie George, England’s captain, and he brought up the subject this week with his head coach, Steve Borthwick. “It was one of the first things I spoke to him about when we met up again and he was already all over it,” said George, as keen as anyone for England to build on the promise shown at Twickenham. “I learned a big lesson in 2019 after the New Zealand performance around emotional highs and lows. Saturday was probably as emotional a performance as we’ve had since 2019. You need to allow yourself to come down to then pick back up and spike at the right time.”
As England now concede, they made the mistake in 2019 of assuming they could roll straight from one weekend to the next without resetting themselves mentally and physically. Almost five years on George says he and his teammates got the process wrong in Japan. “We believed the hype and kept living [the semi-final win] for three or four days afterwards.
“You’re in a World Cup final week and I had every distraction under the sun. People wanting to come over, thousands of people asking you for tickets, people from school coming out of the woodwork who I hadn’t spoken to for 10 years. It’s great but it can be really distracting and I probably learned that the hard way. We definitely got it wrong. We didn’t reach the highs of the week before and what I learned is that you need to give yourself the space to get away from things and reflect. Do what you’ve got to do.”
Hence England’s determination to sidestep the same trap this time. The performance against Ireland boosted everybody connected with the squad but complacency will be fatal against a French side packing about a ton of scrummaging weight. “It will be a huge challenge … it would be naive to say it isn’t,” said England’s scrum coach, Tom Harrison, as the players completed their preparations on the billiard-table surface at Lyon’s impressive 59,000-capacity stadium.