Most players don't fully peak until their late twenties. Like, I thought that was an accepted fact. A player's peak is when they've accumulated as much experience as possible while still retaining their athletic abilities. As for the seven years comment - Flood only got his first run of three games starting as a fly-half in 2009. The period Summer 2010 - 2011 is his only prolonged run in an England shirt at fly-half. I do not believe it is coincidence that the period was also England's best run of results for a long time. Saying "He's had 7 years, how on earth has he not learnt it all" is a bit like saying "Freddie Burns will have been an international for a year by the next window and any slip-up will be hard to forgive" - it completely ignores the paucity of meaningful gametime over most of the period.
Similarly, I am sure there is no coincidence at all in so many players hitting their best ever international form at the same period, and that this achieved things we had not done for a long time before and have not done since - a win in the SH and a Six Nations title. People hit their best form when surrounded by players and a system that brings it out of them. When they are put in pairings and units they perform well in. Is it a coincidence than Ashton's strike rate in tier 1 games Flood has started is better than 1 in 2, is 1 in 4 with Wilkinson (and that came with Wilko off the pitch and Flood on), and 1 in 5 with Farrell? It's actually 9 in 11 games with both Flood and Youngs.
I really don't believe this is a coincidence. I actually went and looked over the stats and did a blog article on it -
http://muchadoaboutrucking.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/englands-central-problem_31.html - it being the difference between 6N 2011 and 6N 2013. Ignore the World Cup, that was a high water mark - maybe not by much, but it was - and if we can't replicate it we should know why. For people too lazy to read, we have vastly reduced penetration in the 9-10-12 channel. Youngs barely ever runs now, Farrell can't produce a line-break and Barritt's metres made stat is pitiful stat next to Hape. Or any other England 12 we've tried recently. And as a result we're not scoring tries and Ashton, who thrived on making late runs into these channels, is not making as many runs or scoring as many tries. People may taint the memory of that team with the actually markedly different World Cup team, or grimace because of Hape and Tindall - but it was clearly a far superior attacking system. Lancaster could learn a lot from it. And if we're being consistent, Barritt should be far more reviled than either Hape or Tindall.
I would actually agree we have a better squad now - not least because we still have all the important performers from the 2011 6N, but all of them with two more years' experience. I agree we're better off without Banahan, and the insistence on Lewis Moody, fit or not, and no Louis Deacon etc.etc. But this raises a really interesting question:
If we have a better squad now than we did then, and most people agree that the coaching then was incompetent and conservative,
what does that make the coaches we have now if the results are worse?
I don't accept the argument that it's all about the World Cup. Obviously it's important but it should not define a coach's reign - it clearly does in this case in the minds of many - but it shouldn't. Plus, Johnson had 3 years - Lancaster is entering his third year. It seems very fair to judge the two on what they achieve in the same time period. Which means that if he does not sort the try scoring issue, beat some more SH countries, and win the Six Nations in the next year, I'll say he's done worse.
And if we think Johnson is conservative, what do we think about Lancaster? Martin Johnson took 4 games to replace an out of form Armitage - a guy who had recent top class international credentials - with Ben Foden - a guy who had only embraced his positional switch in the last year and who had questions over his basics. Lancaster gave the out of form Goode - with no international credentials - a full Six Nations, despite having Mike Brown - no specialist issues, form of his life - bumming around on the wing. Which is worse? Johnson gave Tuilagi and Youngs their international debuts when they were 20 years old after 18 and 17 HEC/GP starts each. How is that conservative? And if it is, how does it compare to the fuss and palaver over trying some of our young international wings - or giving Burns a go ahead of Farrell - or how long it took to cap Kvesic? And Lancaster has ignored Waldrom, if you believe him to be the answer, for Phil Dowson and Tom Wood, which is a far more serious crime than ignoring Easter (as an 8). And, again, Allen for Barritt is a far more compelling call than Allen for Hape. Stuart Lancaster is the guy who's ignored Garvey and Attwood for Mouritz Botha, the guy who ignored Fearns and Gibson for Tom Johnson, and Everybody for David Strettle. How he's considered to be a less conservative coach than Martin Johnson is beyond me. Courtney Lawes made his debut a full year comparatively ahead of Launchbury. And so on. Lancaster has adopted a more conservative playing style, makes changes just as slowly, and doesn't introduce players as young - people, forget the World Cup, look at the facts and open your eyes.
Stuart Lancaster has all the tools there to produce a try scoring England. If he doesn't, what excuses can we make? If you believe Tindall and Hape were awful players who sucked the creativity out of a team, or that Flood is a subpar international fly-half, or that Johnson was a crap coach, or that the players are not ahead of what we have now - how on earth do we excuse a guy who is getting less from more? I'd certainly agree with 3 of those 4 statements, at least partially. I want tries and victory, or I want Lancaster's head. And I also want Toby Flood involved. His recent form has been excellent. He is our only proven international fly-half who creates tries. He's the guy who links best with Ashton and Youngs, who Lancaster appears to be insisting on. Burns has also been in good form, and has huge potential as the sort of player we're looking for, but his Argentina tour was littered with unforced mistakes, and that has to count against him. He needs to be in immaculate form at the start of next season to overtake Flood - and so does Farrell. Farrell really needs to show he can run a try-scoring back line week in, week out.
I also believe that announcing Tom Wood as captain now would be idiotic. That's because announcing any change in captain now is idiotic - it is basically a hostage to fortune you don't need to give. But that aside, Wood? Dropping Robshaw? We've invested a lot of time in Robshaw as a captain and it looks like it might be paying off. So, let us take it from him, and give it to someone else. That in itself strikes me as risky and poorly thought out. I don't get the whole Tom Wood as leader thing either - he didn't look inspiring against Argentina, and it's not like he does a great deal of it at Northampton. And if we're really serious about "We Must Attack to Win", then locking out one of Robshaw and Croft - or both if we include Kvesic - when they are both superior in attack to Wood, strikes me as a dubious call.
Basically, to wrap this up, for one brief glorious moment we played a superior brand of rugby that genuinely looked threatening and successful. I don't think it makes the previous squad or regime a great thing, or that there weren't mistakes. But we should not be so quick to dismiss players who were pivotal to it - such as Toby Flood, or even James Haskell - and who have shown they can put in consistently top international performances. And we really should not be glorifying Lancaster so much when he has yet to hit those heights, or overlooking his conservatism. We should be heavily critical. If Martin Johnson can create a successful side using one of the worst centre partnerships ever, we should be expecting more than we're getting from Lancaster. Lancaster has done some reasonable building work - although I'd say he tore down more and rebuilt more than he needed to - but we should really be seeing results now.
And Jug Ears should be right in contention.
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J'nuh, I feel you're overlooking several key facets of experience and test match rugby - well, any rugby. Rugby is about executing simple skills under pressure. The pressure bit is the key. It's not so much about how well you perform the skill, but how well you perform it when exhausted, when you're about to get hit, when you've got a split second to decide, when you've got a huge burden of expectation on you. The pressure is huge at international level, and listening to the coaches speak, a lot of its in the player's own head as much as anything. This is where experience comes in and is so key. Managing that expectation, instinctively performing the skill, not getting caught up in the moment, reading the options in the time available - the mental skills are hugely important and only come with experience. Actually, to put it another way, yes it is a simple fact of the more you perform a skill, the better you become. But where as kids will be performing the technical and physical skills from five years old, the mental side of first class rugby, insofar as I can see, your only really start practising when you hit it. Therefore the difference of 7 years vs 1 year of international year in terms of technicality is relatively little most of the time. The difference in terms of mental capacity is often really big. Yes, there are some freaks out there, and some guys who simply can't pick it up, but generally, the top 4 per cent is what really benefits from experience. And the top 4 per cent is hugely important in test rugby.
Also, it's really keyed in to desire. A 32 will always want it more than the 22 year old - he has more bitter memories to banish and less chances with which to accomplish the act. Again, the top 4 per cent. How often do we talk about one team wanting it more?
And team cohesion. Again, it's one of those intangibles that effect the head only and is clearly important. We talk about the Lions tour, we talk about the difficult of making a team in so short a period of time. We all know some players perform better with others. It's why I can't buy into this argument of "It will be fine just to slot players back in at the last moment". It probably won't, we certainly saw that with Johnson. Building partnerships is as important as handing out international experience.
