It was a familiar sight: a South African team wearing green and gold blowing away an opposing team with their power game. Only this time it wasn’t the Springboks but the national U20 team in their opening fixture of the Junior World Championship.As was the case the previous week, when, in a doubleheader in Gqeberha, the Boks and the South Africa A team easily dispatched the Barbarians and Zimbabwe, you had to question the quality of the opposition. This time it was the Uruguay U20 team, who were thumped 104-7.Uruguay at times actually surprised me with their competitiveness, just like the Barbarians did at stages of the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium game. But mostly it was one-way traffic. Which, on the basis of what we saw at stages of the last international season from just about all the men’s national teams, is what many South Africans appear to be expecting next weekend when England are the opponents in the first-yet Nations Championship match at Ellis Park.Well, if not one-way traffic, there does seem to be a lot of talk of the expected winning margin, rather than a debate over who will win. I’m not of that persuasion. While I do expect the Boks to win, England are a team that need to be respected and have the material to upset the South Africans if they are as complacent as apparently some of their supporters, and in some cases reporters.It’s easy to see why England are being written off. They finished second last in the Six Nations. They got thumped in Edinburgh by Scotland, they got thumped by Ireland in London, and they suffered their first-yet defeat to Italy in Rome. But if you give any credence to the saying that you are only as good as your last game, then England aren’t half bad. The last game they played was the final Six Nations engagement against France in Paris.England weren’t given much hope in that game. It was a Six Nations decider, with France needing to win to clinch the title and deny the claims of Scotland and Ireland. England had lost three in a row. They were playing France at their fortress, Stade de France, where, apart from against the Boks, they had generally shown imperious form. Yet with two minutes remaining, they were ahead. It was only some dreadfully poor game management that denied England, with France nailing a penalty to clinch a high-scoring game 48-46.It was a ridiculously high-scoring game. But England did manage to score seven tries to France’s six. They didn’t look like a team ranking as low as sixth, which is their current position on the World Rugby rankings, with Argentina ahead of them in fifth.It is No 1 against No 6 this Saturday. Which justifies the Bok favourite status at home. But England weren’t that low when they started the Six Nations and were tripped up by their own complacency. Remember how their coach Steve Borthwick exhorted fans before the start of the competition to book their tickets for the Paris game because it would be the decider, the final frontier that needed crossing to become European champions.What did for England was losing to Scotland at Murrayfield. The games are spaced close together in the Six Nations, and an unexpected defeat can be difficult to recover from. England were still shell-shocked when, knowing they were no longer playing for a Grand Slam, they hosted Ireland. And they were still bombed mentally when they lost to Italy.But in that final game in Paris, they again looked like the team that confidently proclaimed after last year’s autumn internationals against the southern hemisphere teams that they were looking forward to measuring themselves against the one side they didn’t play and beat in that phase of international fixtures — South Africa.At home and at altitude we should expect the Boks to win. But we also expected them to win against a Wallaby team that was not rated and are currently two places lower on the rankings (eighth) than England, the last time they played in Joburg. And we know what happened then.