It is exactly 20 years this week since England kicked off their most embarrassing tour of the professional era. So painful was the 1998 Tour of Hell that almost half the squad’s international careers never recovered and the record margins of defeat still stand. It still seems faintly remarkable that the coach and several of his under-strength squad were kings of the world just five years later.
The three-week expedition to South Africa this month is a relative sedan chair ride compared to the sadistic itinerary which led to Clive Woodward’s team being thrashed 76-0 in Australia and serially battered in New Zealand and South Africa. The potential for reputational damage, even so, is greater than at any point since Eddie Jones took charge two and a half years ago. With the 2019 Rugby World Cup 15 months away, Jones’s depleted squad will require a significant improvement on their Six Nations form to make it out of Africa victorious.
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Perhaps their biggest challenge lies within: proving to themselves they remain a team heading in a mutually beneficial direction. Resting players in the lead-up to the Japanese endurance test next year is fair enough but it is a while since any of Jones’s troops looked bright-eyed or full of mental zip in an international jersey. At least half a dozen of those on the flight south last weekend should also be on sun loungers, according to those who know them best.
How glorious it would be for squad morale if the increasing mutterings regarding training workload, departing defence coaches and a lack of joie de vivre could be silenced in the forbidding old Springboks cathedral of Ellis Park on Saturday. The first Test will be pivotal, not least from a historical perspective. It is eight years since anyone other than New Zealand defeated their hosts at altitude – where the first two games of the series will be staged – and no English side have yet won a multi-Test series in South Africa.
Even a good Ireland team went down 2-1, albeit slightly unluckily, two years ago while Australia have not won a Test anywhere on Springboks soil since 2011. England’s last visit under Stuart Lancaster in 2012 produced two defeats and a dead-rubber draw, with the opening quarter of the second Test in Johannesburg a particularly sobering recollection. After 19 minutes the Boks were ahead 22-3, with England’s players less bothered about winning than survival. The word “brutal” takes on a whole new meaning when a Boks pack sniffs Anglo-Saxon blood.
The four Englishmen still around from that matchday 23 – Chris Robshaw, Joe Marler, Ben Youngs and Owen Farrell, who helped the side battle back to 36-27 as a second-half replacement – know exactly what is coming. Forget the narrow weekend defeat against Wales in Washington DC; the Boks’ smart new coach, Rassie Erasmus, will unveil a very different side at home. The appointment of South Africa’s first black Test captain, Siya Kolisi, will generate further motivation, although the absence of the outstanding hooker Malcolm Marx and lock Eben Etzebeth, both injured, will offer relief to those England forwards humbled by the Barbarians last weekend.
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And therein lies the primary fascination of the tour. Does Jones simply carry on flogging players already creaking at the end of a long season in pursuit of short-term respectability? Alternatively, does he cast his selectorial net wider in the hope of finding individuals capable of rejuvenating England’s World Cup hopes? If he comes no closer to solving the perpetual riddle of his best back-row, midfield and full‑back options it will have been a trip wasted.
Time is not on his side. On the flank, for example, it is asking too much of the newcomer Brad Shields to leap from a losing Hurricanes side in Dunedin into a Test at Ellis Park alongside blokes he has never met. Nor will a long‑haul flight necessarily help Billy Vunipola’s tight hamstring. Ben Earl and Tom Curry are both fine prospects but are either going to terrify the Boks at the breakdown? How long can Vunipola or Nathan Hughes last in a lung‑bursting contest at altitude? It could be that Nick Isiekwe, so good for the Premiership-winning Saracens, enters the frame as an alternative to Robshaw at No6, with Sam Simmonds’s energy and low‑slung power on the bench.
Behind the scrum it will be fascinating to see what Jones’s latest temporary Australian lieutenant, Scott Wisemantel, makes of Danny Cipriani, whether Elliot Daly is handed the No15 jersey and who wears 10 and 13. Without the injured Ben Te’o and Jonathan Joseph, the temptation will be to start Farrell at 12 for all three Tests and slot others around him. Jones might conceivably learn more by sticking Farrell at 10 initially, with Cipriani or Ford coming on for the last half hour. Pairing Alex Lozowski alongside Henry Slade in the centres, with Daly at full-back and Denny Solomona and Jonny May on the wings, would certainly make people sit up and take note.
If, alternatively, a long-faced England limp home none the wiser as to whether Cipriani, Ellis Genge, Luke Cowan-Dickie, Dan Robson and Jason Woodward can add zest to their World Cup campaign, sympathy will be in even shorter supply than bath water in Cape Town. If even their Saracens contingent, so energised in the Premiership play-offs, look flat and uninspired it will be clear all is not well in Jonestown. The next three weekends will either be hellish or heavenly.