You can measure a good team by how many they’ve won, or you can measure them by how many they might have lost but didn’t. The Red Roses are well ahead on the first count, they’re on a 30-match winning streak now, and have suffered just the one, solitary, defeat in the last six years.
But it’s less clear what their other tally is. Their one-point victory over France in the final match of this year’s Six Nations was the only time they’ve had to confront the possibility of losing in the last few months, and even in that match they led from start to finish.
Which made the first half of this victory against Australia the most intriguing 40 minutes they’ve had in a long while.
Australia started fast, and hard. They had two advantages. One was that they needed to play well to make sure of their place in the quarter-finals, if they lost by 76 or more they would be out of the tournament, and the other that they were coming into this match off the back of a fiercely competitive Test against the USA, who were now level with them on points in Pool A.
England, on the other hand, had played two pushovers in a row, and knew they were already through to the knockout rounds. England, who have never lost to the Wallaroos, maybe didn’t know that they were breaking one sport’s golden rules by going soft on an Australian team.
Five minutes in, Australia scored from a rolling maul. For the first time in over eight hours of Test match rugby since they went 3-0 down in the opening minutes against Wales in Cardiff last March, England found themselves in the unfamiliar position of being behind on the scoreboard. It’s easy to look good when you’re well out in front, but it’s much more interesting to see how a team handle life when they’re losing.
For 40 minutes, the match teetered in the balance. The large part of the game was played in England’s half, and the stadium was eerily quiet, as if the English fans, who are so used to watching their team run away with it, were confused to see them struggling.
Abby Dow scored in the corner from the restart, and England’s defence held when Australia came on from a second rolling maul, Amy Cokayne just managed to stop them from scoring when she got underneath the ball after Eva Karpani broke over the tryline, but elsewhere their play was wayward.
One attack faltered when Ellie Kildunne missed a pass that would have put her through down the right wing, another when Natasha Hunt threw the ball forward to put Kildunne through a gap. They blew the chance of a second try when Cokayne dropped the ball as she tried to force the last inch of a rolling maul.
Hannah Botterman, who has arguably been their best player during their recent games, was forced off injured. They conceded a scrum penalty, and bungled a lineout. No doubt about it, England were under heavy pressure for the first time in this tournament.
Like Sadia Kabeya said afterwards, “it was our toughest game so far. You can see in the first half we got put under pressure. But we needed it. There are a lot of things to work on and iron out.”
Well, hell, they still won by 40 points in the end. So you might think this is all nitpicking. But the point is that there are two Red Roses teams playing in this tournament, the one English fans are watching, who have reeled off back-to-back victories by 62, 89, and 40, and the one the teams they still need to beat are busy analysing.
And while one lot of spectators only have eyes for all those tries England have been scoring, the other will be much more interested in the weaknesses they can see in their game. Truth is, there are more of them than there maybe ought to be. The question is whether anyone will be able to make them pay for them.
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You can be sure no one’s beating them unless they can find a way to stop their rolling maul. England used it brilliantly to get themselves out of trouble here, just like they had done when they wanted to assert themselves in the first quarter against the USA during their opening game in Sunderland. It was the smart play. And going safety-first worked. It earned them five tries in this match.
You half expected to see Brian Moore, Wade Dooley, Peter Winterbottom and the rest of the men’s pack from back in 1991 pop up in the middle of all those thrashing limbs. Well, it worked well enough for their team during that tournament, of course, all the way up until the point where it didn’t and they lost the final by 12-6.
