Steve Borthwick has engineered his team to get stronger in the last quarter and the All Blacks could not cope with this monstrous lot
There’s the England they sell you in the glossy magazines and then there’s the England you find on days like this one at Twickenham. Cold, grey, hostile, the days when anyone lucky enough to have the choice takes one look out the window and realises time is going to be best spent indoors.
The All Blacks did not have that luxury. Their head coach, Scott Robertson, spoke in the week about the work he had done to prepare his players. “We’re looking forward to it,” he said. Perhaps he really believed it. But so long as England are playing like this, it will be a long time till any team takes any pleasure in the prospect of a day out here.
You could feel this England performance coming. It was in the air during the previous couple of weeks, when they beat Australia and Fiji, and it was there in the air again before the match. It was one of those foreboding days when Twickenham looks more like the national stadium at Mordor, and the orcs have brought 80,000 fans who want blood.
England arranged themselves into a “U” formation to face down the haka, led, at the edges, by Henry Pollock and Jamie George, who walked right up to the halfway line and stood there staring at the opposition as if they were eyeballing the prime rib at the carvery.
