England vs Australia: Billy Twelvetrees restored at centre but Sam Burgess casts giant shadow

The former rugby league man is ready to make his debut for Bath in the 15-man code

England will go into their “last chance saloon” game against Australia at Twickenham on Saturday with their fifth centre pairing in six matches, Billy Twelvetrees having bumped Owen Farrell out of the starting line-up following an eye-catching cameo against Samoa last weekend.

Yet much of the chatter surrounded one of the few midfield contenders still to be selected by the red-rose coach Stuart Lancaster, who remains understandably reticent about picking someone who has never played a game of rugby union in his life.

That experience gap is likely to close a tiny fraction on Friday evening when Sam Burgess, brand new to this union lark after a stellar few years in top-end rugby league, takes the field for Bath in a Premiership match with Harlequins at the Recreation Ground.

Not even “Slammin’ Sam’s” most committed supporters, many of whom made up their minds that he could do no wrong in the 15-man code while he was still playing the 13-man version, would expect him to break into the England team on the back of a single showing off the bench in a club fixture, but there were times today when it seemed he was already there in spirit.

“I’ll be watching the Bath match – it’s a good way of wiling away the time before an England international,” Lancaster said when the B-word was introduced into the conversation.

“We’ll have to wait and see with Sam, but the earlier he starts playing this game, the more he will learn about it. He’s a quality individual and a quality rugby player, but I’m not sure that Sam himself thinks it’s realistic to break into our squad as quickly as has been suggested. Some league players adapt quickly to union and some don’t. It is for him to show us that he has something more to offer than other people, because we can only select on facts.”

Just about the last thing Twelvetrees needs to hear right now is that he is merely keeping the No 12 shirt warm for a rival – especially when the supposed rivalry is based more on popular assumption than on hard evidence.

Happily, the Gloucester captain is adept at dealing with the slings and arrows of sporting fortune. He has proved as much by fighting his way back into the red-rose midfield after a negative experience in New Zealand last summer.

Thrown into the second Test against the All Blacks in Dunedin after a six-week injury lay-off, entirely on the strength of a fine run of form in the Six Nations, he was pilloried for a dodgy offload early in the second half, dropped for the final match of the series in Hamilton and then forced to play second fiddle to both Farrell and Kyle Eastmond in this current autumn campaign. The message he received from the England coaches was that he was too inconsistent and error-prone – too flaky, to put it bluntly – and was therefore surplus to immediate requirements.

“Was it hard to take? It was and it wasn’t,” Twelvetrees said, as sanguine as ever. “I’ve always played my rugby with a positive outlook, so after Dunedin it was a case of ‘what’s done is done, how do I move forward?’ I was very disappointed to lose my place, but I still back myself to go out there and try things.

“This game is all about decision-making: it’s what the great players do so well. I’ve worked hard to improve in that area and I’m delighted to be involved against a side as good as the Wallabies. It’s never nice when you’re not involved.”

Twelvetrees has not started a Test alongside the new England outside-half George Ford, but the two played together at Leicester Tigers before heading for different parts of the West Country to maximise their chances of first-team rugby.

According to Ford, his old mucker from the Tigers’ second-string side is every bit as vocal a communicator as Farrell and has the full range of inside-centre skills as well.

Lancaster, who made two widely predicted changes to his forward pack by recalling Northampton’s Dylan Hartley at hooker and Tom Wood at blind-side flanker, flatly rejected suggestions that he had been overly ruthless in cutting Eastmond and a second Bath back, the wing Semesa Rokoduguni, from his match-day squad, even though both men were first-choice players against New Zealand as recently as three weeks ago.

“We gave Kyle the first two starts in this series, which we thought was right,” he said. “As for ‘Roko’, what’s happened with him is circumstantial. He picked up an injury against the All Blacks that ruled him out against South Africa, and by the time he was fit to resume training it was too late for the Samoa game.

“Since then, Anthony Watson has made big strides on the right wing. He’s been unlucky in the sense that his injury changed the dynamic as far as he was concerned, but it hasn’t changed our thinking in terms of what he can do,” he added.

The coach did agree with one thing: that after two defeats against major southern hemisphere opponents, Saturday’s game had all the hallmarks of a “mood shaper”. But Lancaster did not entirely accept the premise. “To me, it will shape our mood going into the Six Nations in February, not the World Cup in September,” he said.

Even so, a failure now against a big-hitting team drawn in England’s pool for the global tournament in 10 months’ time will be painful. Excruciatingly so.