Yahoo Sports Steve Borthwick sends England Six Nations warning over referees
Steve Borthwick has warned his England players to be wary of Test referees’ interpretations of the scrum and breakdown in the upcoming Six Nations.
The England head coach believes Premiership referees are more adept than their Test counterparts at keeping rugby’s rucks and scrum clean and tidy, with Telegraph Sport revealing in October how England had been highlighting breakdown interpretations at the World Cup to World Rugby.
“The nature of the breakdown is refereed differently in international rugby and the nature of the scrum is refereed differently in international rugby,” Borthwick said. “Teams having the opportunity to scrum for penalties is important [but] we’re looking at too many scrums not getting to the contest. I like the scrum contest and I don’t want that to leave our game.
“Sometimes, what we’re doing is taking that contest away a little bit by wanting the ball in and out and if it doesn’t stay up then we’re playing away and we’re not having another scrum. We know Test rugby is not like that. Test rugby, the scrum is a contest, as we found out – while improving – to our cost in the World Cup semi-final.
“The breakdown is a huge contest as well. English referees; the way they referee the Premiership, the speed of ball is high and they want the ball out of that breakdown. The area around the ball is clean in the Premiership because if it’s not, it’s penalised.
“At Test rugby, that’s different. At Test rugby, that area is not as clean as that and the back row becomes one of the biggest notes I review every session, every game, every tournament. When it comes to the breakdown, everyone’s got a responsibility but the back row are key.
“You see so many good back rows in the Six Nations and that means the breakdown is a real contest area. There is no competition in world rugby that has a turnover rate as high as the Six Nations.
“Everything we have is saying that the breakdown competition is fierce. We’re also seeing that the standard of the defence, as you go up the levels, is higher so less tackles are being missed and it’s getting harder and harder.”
England begin their Six Nations campaign against Italy in Rome on Saturday February 3 hoping to wrest a decline in the championship which has seen them win just 50 per cent of matches over the past five years. This Tuesday, Borthwick’s 36-player squad will convene at their training base at Pennyhill Park before flying to Girona for a warm-weather camp, with Borthwick optimistic that the increased competitiveness of the Premiership will stand his side in good stead for the improved fitness levels of Test rugby.
Allied to the ever improving defensive standards at Test level, Borthwick also backed calls for a reassessment for the number of replacements allowed in a match, believing that fewer could lead to greater fatigue and, therefore, more space.
“What we’re seeing now, the nature of the game is there’s less space and if we’re going to create space, we need to have some level of fatigue in what we’re doing and there are different areas you can tweak,” Borthwick added.
“One area you can tweak is the number of replacements because that will impact the fatigue that’s in the game. The fatigue that’s in the game then impacts the amount of space. That’s one way of looking at it, if you want to generate some space.
“As the players are getting fitter, you put eight replacements onto the pitch, it means there is [less] space. The players are fitter at Test level so the second-half hasn’t got the space that it has in the Premiership, because players are fitter.”
