Pity poor Chris Robshaw. England’s sturdy captain might have a knockout girlfriend and exceptional skills on the cappuccino machine, but he has taken one hell of a pounding from Her Majesty’s armchair battalion of former players and coaches, much more than he took from Sam Warburton at Twickenham on Saturday. Give the guy a break. His decision to go for a line-out and set up a possible winning try rather than attempt a very difficult penalty kick at goal to draw ‘defied belief’ said one newspaper, the same paper that described a similar decision by the Japan captain Michael Leitch in that miraculous last-gasp victory over South Africa as ‘faultless’. One captain is bold and brave, the other muddled and confused, suffering a ‘moment of madness’. Oh please.
Here’s a few things: the kick was never a certainty, even with Owen Farrell in spectacularly good form; had he missed, the Welsh would have had possession and could have advanced upfield, scored and deprived England of even a losing bonus point; World Cup-winning sides tend to win all their games so if you want to win the cup, you must win your games, and not settle for a functional draw when the chance is there for a romantic win. Poor Robshaw: if the lineout ensuing from the penalty hadn’t been so shockingly bad, England might have scored their try and all the moaners would be saluting a brave gamble.
In an odd and furious newspaper article this week a former World Cup-winning coach (yes, it was Sir Clive since you ask) argues that there wasn’t enough planning, or if there was, it was ignored. The idea that you might go into a World Cup without having already decided at least nine months before what you were going to do if you got a penalty out wide with two minutes to go and were trailing by three points in your second group match is clearly anathema to Wooders.
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