What’s going wrong with English rugby

Rejoice, as you don’t normally say after a hammering like the peerless French dished out to England at Twickenham. But looking on the bright side, at last English rugby knows its place, and it’s not pretty. The consensus in the hospitality lounges appeared to be that it was all Eddie Jones’s fault, though that feels a bit unfair to me. But hey ho, the darkest hour before the dawn and all that. And you can learn more from defeat than victory… fingers crossed.

What we can see is that France and Ireland are in a different league, with Scotland close behind. Certain players, poor Jack van Poortvliet at scrum-half, and Alex Dombrandt in a hopelessly outclassed back row, should go back to their clubs. George Ford, a hugely talented fly-half, should be given a chance by England in Dublin for the climax to the season on Saturday.

The preposterous rule that says players who go abroad cannot be picked should be scrapped forthwith; and the ludicrously overpaid RFU chief executive, Bill ‘Sweeney Todd’ Sweeney, who wins every week on £668,000 a year, should stand aside. Most important of all, what about playing with intensity, and not dropping the ball? There seems to be a lack of leadership in the scrum, partlyI guess because many of the best club scrums in the Gallagher Premiership are being marshalled by powerful South Africans and Argentinians. Does that mean that English forwards with a taste for leadership aren’t coming forward? It’s hard to believe, but once the England scrum started to founder last weekend, there didn’t seem to be anyone who could rescue it.

The best moment of this brilliant Six Nations came in Paris a month ago when Antoine Dupont, France’s prodigiously gifted scrum-half, was the last line of defence against Ireland’s flying winger Mack Hansen.