Borthwick’s England have many problems but fitness isn’t one ...Middle East

Seven in a row. England used to put together winning runs like this. Now it is losing runs.

Seven meetings with top-tier nations, all lost. And maybe worst of all, Steve Borthwick’s side led in all with under 30 minutes left.

If they had hoped that 2025 might represent a fresh start, they were left disappointed by a 27-22 defeat to Ireland that flattered them.

They led 10-5 at the break but conceded 22 points in 21 second-half minutes and only got back to within one score through Tommy Freeman’s try when the clock had already gone red.

The familiar story played out on the scoreboard and tactics board, as England’s defence faded away in the latter stages, picked off by one of the best attacking units in the world.

Fin Smith among three England changes for France Six Nations clash

Borthwick’s defensive system has been through several incarnations since Eddie Jones was sacked in December 2022. The hardcore, all-out blitz system deployed by defence coach Felix Jones displayed green shoots of growth during England’s tour of New Zealand last summer, where they lost two Tests narrowly, the first by a single point.

But Jones resigned in protest at a reported “unstable working environment” shortly after that and England’s line speed in the autumn, where they lost three more Test matches to top-tier teams, seemed not as consistent. By nature, the blitz defence is only as strong as its least committed member, and England shipped a total of 95 points to New Zealand, South Africa and Australia, a signal perhaps that the message of unity with Jones out of the picture was not what it was. On the scoreboard at least, this pattern was repeated in the second half of the Ireland game.

“England are unfit,” former Ireland and Lions winger Tommy Bowe told the BBC.

“You can’t say it any other way. Even in the first half they came out of the gates so fast, their line speed was amazing, all of a sudden 10 minutes before half-time players started to go down.

“It seemed like they were deliberately trying to slow down play. And then in the second half, they just had no puff. They had no energy. They were walking to line-outs.”

Other former pros saw it differently, with former Wales fly-half Dan Biggar suggesting “there is no way England’s players aren’t fit enough to be playing at this level” and Borthwick refusing to blame conditioning for the defeat.

But there is no doubt that a high-tempo defence is hard work, for any team.

“If it’s like a type of system that England were using under Felix Jones, or what the South Africans were using under Jacques Nienaber, you’ve got to be relentless,” Tom Tombleson, England’s strength and conditioning coach for a decade before leaving last summer, tells The i Paper.

“You have got to accelerate off the line over and over again, whereas there were times back in the day when a winger, for example, just would not need to do that amount of work.

“Ultimately, if you’re getting off the line harder, more aggressively, it’s going to have a cost, depending on how you then play on the other side of the ball. Everything costs, doesn’t it? At some point you’ve got to pay the ferryman.”

Why England keep fading in big games - and how Borthwick can fix it

Against Ireland, the ferryman’s bill was a hefty one and while it was to an extent the same old story, it was told a different way.

The all-out blitz and kamikaze line speed was gone.

The pre-tournament camp in Girona, where defence coach Joe El-Abd was present despite his current job-share with French team Oyonnax, was spent developing a hybrid approach.

“The blitz that we knew it is no longer there and I liked what I saw,” former England scrum-half Ben Youngs said on the For The Love Of Rugby podcast.

“It was still [fast] off the line, it was still trying to put teams under pressure and getting high in the eye-line and forcing mistakes, but it was a lot more connected and a lot more together.

“I like that they’re still aggressive, but it looked way more controlled. By and large, especially on goal-line defence, England were so tenacious.

“England were hard to play against in that first half. You can see they’ve changed that philosophy.”

England are not the only ones, though.

“There’s a bit of a shift from an all-or-nothing, man-and-ball [approach] to one that’s up, hold, push again on the pass,” Sale Sharks director of rugby Alex Sanderson said last month.

“Most defences are shifting towards that anyway.”

Ireland legend accuses England players of being 'unfit' after Six Nations loss

As it so often has for England over the last year, it worked – at first. But fitness, Borthwick said, could not be blamed for the drop-off.

It would have been an easy get-out, given England’s current predicament. Since Tombleson and Aled Walters, now the British & Irish Lions strength and conditioning guru, left, they have not been replaced. Saracens’ Phil Morrow will join but not until the summer, having had a part-time switch blocked by the Premiership over conflict of interest concerns.

In a group where the defensive system differs quite radically from one played at club level and time to learn it is short, even a refined version of the all-out defence, the role of the S&C department cannot be overstated.

“If you start looking at the pieces of the puzzle and thinking, ‘Where am I going to get this done?’ It’s like that with international rugby,” Tombleson says.

“If you’re a player that plays as part of a defensive system with a Premiership club throughout the whole of your pre-season, and the pre-autumn period, and then you come in, you’ve got 10 days to get fit for a new defence system, it’s daunting, because you think, ‘How am I going to get this done here?’

“The players that are already playing that defensive system have clearly got an advantage. At one point Exeter were defending [in a blitz], you could argue that those players had an advantage just because they were more used to it, and they understood it a little bit better, so it didn’t have quite so much [physical] cost when you tried to do that, when you were playing England.

“But there isn’t a part of rugby that doesn’t have a physical component to it, so there’s challenges everywhere. It’s just talking to the coach and seeing how you can best equip them to do it.”

Rather than agreeing with pundits like Bowe though, Borthwick admitted that Ireland had outmanoeuvred England in the central period of the game, a probable result of their vastly experienced bench, boasting 509 caps among the replacements, only 59 fewer than England’s entire starting XV.

“It was evident how hard the players ran for each other,” Borthwick said.

“There was a period in the third quarter where tactically [Ireland] won a couple of those kick battles and there were a couple of penalties and that wasn’t down to conditioning.”

England box-kicked more than any other team in the Six Nations last weekend with their expert in the field, Alex Mitchell, back at scrum-half. They also averaged just 25.5 metres per kick in open play, compared to Ireland’s 30.7.

Kick-chase is the most exhausting part of the game, so the shorter kicking works in England’s favour in two ways: firstly, a better chance of retaining possession but secondly, it reduces the amount of work required from those chasers.

So maybe this isn’t a question of fitness or conditioning at all. Biggar puts it more bluntly than Borthwick could for fear of entirely throwing his players under the bus.

“The effort England are putting into the game in the first 60 minutes is having to be so big for them to stay in contention, that they’re unable to do it for the full 80,” Biggar told the Daily Mail.

“Some might see that as a lack of conditioning. But it’s not that.

“Speaking from personal experience, it’s more that the effort of the first hour – where you have to do so much work – takes a mental toll as much as physical.”

At least England have home advantage, but in the Six Nations the challenge rarely relents. Ireland retreat, France advance, and their goal is much the same: to kick an Englishman while he is down.

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Borthwick’s England have many problems but fitness isn’t one )

Also on site :

• Death toll in Iran port explosion mounts to 25
• Several killed as car rams into crowd at Vancouver festival
• Mass shooting in Myrtle Beach tourist hotspot leaves 11 injured, suspect killed by police