Six Nations: It’s scrum time as England aim to bring Wales to heel

Steve Borthwick and Eddie Jones hope to emulate Japan's success (Getty Images)

“The first thing is, from day one, we said we’d hook the ball at the scrum.” So said Steve Borthwick, England’s forwards coach, as his team prepares for next Saturday’s encounter with Wales at Twickenham in what should be the seminal game of this year’s RBS Six Nations Championship.

You understand where Borthwick is coming from. “We want the ball at the No 8’s feet as quickly as possible because that gives us options and variety,” he added. “If the ball is [stuck] in the middle, we don’t have options.”

You could say that sums up many of the problems of the modern game, where players sometimes seem to forget that the ball is to play with rather than to watch as it sits in a scrum or ruck.

The comment about hooking would bring a wry smile to the likes of Peter Wheeler, Fran Cotton and Phil Blakeway. They formed the England front row that, 36 years ago, was also preparing to play Wales at Twickenham and, after winning 9-8, would go on to complete England’s first Grand Slam in 23 years.

Having won two matches in what was then the Five Nations, the last thing on English minds in 1980 when Wales came calling was a Grand Slam. It is five years since modern England won a championship, 13 since they won the Slam; in 1980, the interval since an outright championship triumph was 17 years.

If the crowd pouring into Twickenham on Saturday thinks England need rehabilitation after a poor World Cup, during which Wales won at Twickenham in a crucial pool game, imagine what it was like turning up for England games a couple of generations ago.

The parallels are inexact; it is England now who have the fresh-faced look, Wales who arrive with the experience. Then, England had at last kept faith with their better players while Wales were in transition after the glory years of the 1970s. Yet Wales arrived on the back of four titles in five years, two of them Slams. Their successors have won three championships and two Slams in the past eight years, both Slams featuring wins at Twickenham.

“England was still the game to win,” Eddie Butler, who played No 8 for Wales in 1980 and is now a broadcaster and journalist, said. “France were far more successful then but theirs was an alien culture, you only came across them once a year. With England it was pure history and all the social stuff, plus there was huge weight on our shoulders after the success of the generation before, the Gareths and Geralds and JPRs.”

Wheeler, hooker that day and one of English club rugby’s most progressive administrators since his playing days at Leicester ended in the mid-1980s, admits that “none of us really knew what a Grand Slam was, we hadn’t been close to one throughout the ’70s, we didn’t appreciate how difficult it was to win and that continues to this day. You might be churlish and say that the standard this year has not been very good, because it’s just after a World Cup, there have been injuries and retirements, but it’s the same for everyone. You still have to win, home and away.”

Today, of course, the minutiae of professional preparation bears no comparison to yesteryear, when the amateur players met up on the Thursday before the match and depended on the coach for the general outline and senior players for detail. “The players have now got apps for everything, they have grown up in a situation where there is instant access to footage or analysis of ourselves or the opposition,” Borthwick said.

When England and Wales run out on Saturday, there will be few unknowns about the opposition. Even fewer, perhaps, for Chris Robshaw, whose London home is 300 metres from that of Jamie Roberts, the Wales centre who plays for Harlequins. “You have a huge respect for these guys, especially when you get to work with them and see them on a daily basis,” Robshaw said.

But Borthwick emphasises the sifting process that must occur. “There is tons of information, it’s how you want to use it. Identifying key personnel is important but you have to concentrate on what you do, and do it well. What is our game? What are we trying to improve? The next bit is the tweak towards the opposition and Eddie [Jones, head coach] is really good at making the game plan specific to the opposition.”

But back to that hooking business. Wheeler and Co would have accepted as normal the need for quick scrum ball, an art lost in modern scrummaging technique that shunts the front row over the ball. During last autumn’s World Cup, two countries – Canada and the Japan side coached by Jones and Borthwick – produced the quickest scrum ball seen in Test rugby in years. If the England coached by the same men can learn to replicate that, they will be on the front foot immediately and that is no bad place to be.