Concede over 50 points at home and yet the consensus is that Wales improved significantly from last week.
That just shows how crap they are.
As I said last week:
England didn't play particularly well but easily got 48 points and probably left another try or 2 on the field, I was a bit disappointed that we lost our patterns of play when Spencer came on, we really need a better option as the backup 9. The pack were mostly very good, I do though still have problems with how often Earl seems to play for himself and I thought Curry was really dumb with his yellow card. Itoje was a little unlucky that he came on right when we were on a warning but he always plays on the edge of the rules so it's always a risk.
Nothing from that changed this week with the big difference being Scotland planned for our 'truck it through the middle or kick for territory' approach and played to make a fucking mess of the breakdown and run it back rather than getting drawn into kick tennis. As soon as they got their gameplan right we had no response and everything that we see as the strengths of our game got flipped on us.
Borthwick needs a plan 'b' and that's been obvious for a long time. He got lucky with it at the world cup because the players basically forced him to change things up and there were promising signs last year but then the Lions took all our better players away and left him to fall back into old patterns and we did ok so he abandoned all the more progressive stuff that was working this time last year. That time a defeat to Scotland made him switch things up so I have some hope that will happen again but I don't trust him not to regress again at the first chance.
England need to change things up before the next world cup if they want to make the most of the depth we have available and the obvious choice, as much as I dislike it, is Phil Dowson. Saints are the club in English rugby who are creating a sustainable identity to their play based around English players with the skillset to mix things up and play winning rugby. Got the title in 2024, euro final last year (but largely sacrificed the league for it) and are top of the league again and looking good in Europe. There's already about 15 players who are either with England or England A and a bunch more coming through in the U20s so England at every level are heavily reliant on Saints players anyway.
