England's rugby team faces a tough battle in the 2025 Six Nations as they strive to climb the competitive ladder. Their opening match against Ireland highlighted the gap between the top tier teams and the rest. Can England overcome France, their traditional rivals, and defy expectations to challenge for the championship?
There will be the odd aberration, like last year’s shock England win against Ireland at Twickenham, but last week’s first round of the Guinness Six Nations confirmed what most thought they knew already - there are three different tiers in the competition. The top tier is taken up by the two sides playing in the northern hemisphere international competition who belong in the top four of world rugby alongside the global champions South Africa and New Zealand.
France and Ireland both confirmed at the weekend that they are a level above the rest, with Scotland and England some way behind, and Italy and Wales even further behind them. If you didn’t watch the game, don’t read too much into the final scoreline in Dublin, which reflected just a five point Ireland win. The contest was long since over when England scored two tries against a lax Ireland who knew they already had the game won. England will of course take heart from those two late scores, and their coach Steve Borthwick will cling onto anything that can give his team some hope before they host France in the game that is customarily known the other side of the English Channel as Le Crunch. The game is at Twickenham, which you’d normally think should give England some advantage, but let’s cast our minds back nearly two years to the last time a Six Nations match featuring these two teams was played at England’s home ground. It was on 11 March, almost exactly 23 months to the day from Saturday’s game, that France humiliated England with a record 53-10 win. Of course, England were just starting out in the post Eddie Jones era under Steve Borthwick at that time, and they are undeniably a much improved unit on the one that was massacred on home turf. But while England have become more competitive under Borthwick than they were then, you get the sense that patience is running out among England supporters and the English rugby media with performances that are regarded as competitive but which don’t get the team over the line as winners. A loss by a respectable score against Antoine Dupont’s team will not be enough to satisfy the critics, for there have been too many of those since England came agonisingly close to beating France in France at the end of the last Six Nations season. Make no mistake, they’ve played some good teams in that time, meaning the All Blacks thrice, South Africa once, Ireland once and that game against France, but in their last nine games they have won just twice. And those two wins were both against Japan - once in Tokyo en route to New Zealand last July and then in London in November. What has become frustrating for the English rugby public is the same old movie theme of those defeats. Invariably they’ve put up a good show for much of the game and then been unable to close it out in the last quarter. Even against the world champion Boks that was the case when they met a few months ago, with Siya Kolisi’s team winning by more than a score in the end but it was anyone’s game after an hour. Against Ireland in the opener to their 2025 campaign it was a similar story and a sequence that has become all too familiar. They troubled Ireland in the first half, and took an early lead. But the longer the game lasted, and we are talking even before halftime, when England led by three points, the more it became apparent that England would not be able to sustain their challenge. In the second half, until the last minutes when England grabbed their consolation losing bonus point, it was all Ireland. I wrote in November after Ireland lost to the All Blacks in Dublin that what has become an established top four in world rugby could soon shrink to a top three. The assumption being that Ireland were going to start to flag and that they’d hit their peak. Well, hold the phone sports lovers, for maybe that assumption of Irish demise was premature. Don’t write off their chances of being challengers at the next World Cup in Australia in 2027. Ireland looked flat in November and apart from losing to New Zealand they weren’t that flush against the Wallabies, sneaking to a win by just three points. But they had their zip back against England, they had tempo and most of all they had attacking shape. There had been suggestions that Leinster, who provide most of the Ireland players, had veered too much in the opposite direction when former Springbok defence guru and World Cup winning coach Jacques Nienaber joined the coaching team, and that it was impacting on the national side. Well, those fears should have been allayed by the potency Ireland showed on attack and they were pressing for another try before England’s score at the end of the AVIVA Stadium clash. Perhaps the biggest question that Ireland needed answering, and this dates back to their World Cup exit at the hands of New Zealand at the quarterfinal stage, is how they are going to survive life without Jonny Sexton
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