Owen Farrell set to return how will the back line look going forward?
Martyn Simpson is joined once again by Phil Bramley and James Copley to discuss the second round of Rugby World Cup pool stage action. Bright spots for England in their win over Japan but with Owen Farrell set to return how will the back line look going forward? It's all still to play for in Wales' pool after Fiji beat Australia and it's a big weekend ahead for Scotland who are back on the pitch against Tonga.
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00:00 Hello and welcome to Kick and Chase, National World's Rugby World Cup 2020 free podcast.
00:05 I'm your host Martin Simpson, joined once again by Phil Bramley and James Copley, and
00:09 we're going to be looking back at the recent round of results and looking ahead to the
00:13 next round of fixtures at this year's Rugby World Cup finals in France.
00:18 Obvious place to start Phil, England. Good result? Performance?
00:22 Well, yeah, being an England fan you're never happy are you? I mean, if you'd said before
00:27 the game, win by 20 points, score four tries, don't let any tries in, you'd say happy days,
00:33 top the group, move on in. But yeah, that first half was a tough, tough watch. You know,
00:40 the people chewing their arms off, you know, literally trying to get some sort of excitement
00:44 into the game. What's interesting for me is whether or not, whether the team were just
00:49 sticking to the plan and they'd just been told to kick the leather off the ball regardless
00:53 of whether that's a play of the conditions. I know everyone said again, the ball was really
00:57 slippery, hot, humid night and they didn't want to play with a lot of the ball in their
01:00 own territory. But it did seem, even when we're getting close to 22, we're still putting
01:04 kicks through, which seems like a strange, strange way to do it. Having said all of that,
01:08 you can't really complain about the outcome. The second half, it did pick up. I thought
01:13 the introduction of Mark Smith, the full-back, admittedly against a tie in Japan, they seemed
01:17 to cut a few lines. Lovely crossfield kick from George Ford again, trying the corner.
01:23 So there were improvements. It's steady progression. Whether or not the English baseball will stick
01:28 with them, I mean, I remember really clearly, you know, back in 2003, the Aussie press going
01:33 after John Wilkinson, is that all you've got, just to kind of drop kicks? Nobody cares.
01:37 We came up, we came up against the trophy. If they do at this time, I'm more than happy
01:41 to watch them ball the pants off anybody if it means we win 3-0 and take the trophy home.
01:45 Can't see it happening, to be honest. I still think we have to go up significantly, looking
01:49 at the way, particularly Ireland, but also South Africa, this round just kind of looked
01:54 like they were on a different level and playing a different game, quite frankly. But you can't
01:57 really blame England for that. They did what they needed to do. I took in back in 2018
02:02 when England were losing at half-time to Japan. So, you know, they got the job done. People
02:07 said score tries, they scored tries, albeit off a header from Joe Marle, which is just
02:11 bizarre. So yeah, definitely steady progress, but still a long way to go if they want to
02:17 progress really deep into this competition and get to that semi-final, final and hopefully
02:21 win it.
02:22 Yeah, I mean, a little bit of that. There was a lot of positives to take from that game.
02:28 You just, I think, against a team that were more clinical than Japan, that didn't knock
02:33 the ball on every time they seemed to have it in hand. But listen, we spoke about George
02:40 Ford after the Argentina game and how, well, the 10 jersey was pretty much his after that
02:45 performance. He was definitely in the final 20 minutes, 25-20 minutes, probably most of
02:52 the second half, he was certainly getting back to those levels. But if he played himself
02:57 into that 10 jersey for the rest of the tournament in the Argentina game, I felt in the first
03:02 half and maybe the first five, 10 minutes of the second half against Japan, he was doing
03:07 everything he could to maybe play himself out of it.