One hundred and twenty-six days have now elapsed since England last won a game of Test rugby and the long wait goes on. In terms of this series the clock has already stopped ticking, South Africa having taken an unsurpassable 2-0 lead with one left to play in Cape Town on Saturday. Five Test defeats in a row and counting is the starkest English statistic of all.
It is a grim sequence that Eddie Jones, his coaches and players, for all their hard work, seem depressingly unable to shake. Again they threw away an excellent start, losing momentum, discipline and, gradually, belief as the Springboks dished out a lesson in directness, execution and collective desire. This is far from the greatest South Africa team of all time but they have still been consistently too strong for England.
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For all the dash of Jonny May and Elliot Daly, England continue to add up to less than the sum of their parts on and off the field. Looming job cuts have Rugby Football Union staff fretting at home and all sorts of questions suddenly hover over the national team’s progression towards next year’s World Cup in Japan. Whatever magic dust Jones scattered earlier in his tenure has long since disappeared into the ether.
What makes it even more frustrating is England’s continuing inability to finish games they have initially dominated. For the second week running they made an eye-catching start, with two tries inside three minutes within the first quarter. For the second week running it all came crashing down. This time they gave away 13 penalties, having solemnly sworn beforehand to be squeaky clean. As one wag asked rhetorically on social media what is the word for deja vu in Afrikaans?
England certainly should have known what was coming once they had again exploited acres of space in South Africa’s wide channels to register early tries through Mike Brown and the roaming May. From 12-0 down on the scoreboard, the Springbok forwards ultimately took a firm grip in another storming game which, at times, was almost reckless in pace. England, in contrast, played only in fits and starts, made too many errors and faded badly after losing Billy Vunipola with another significant-looking arm injury at half-time.
In Duane Vermeulen, South Africa had the perfect man to exploit any defensive fragility. The No 8, always a powerful threat, is a tough man to stop at full bore and once he had left Maro Itoje and Ben Youngs sprawled in his wake to put his side on the scoreboard after 25 minutes the contest assumed a different complexion.
The game was already simmering in other ways, with plenty of niggle, pushing and shoving. England were clearly trying to get at Faf de Klerk but once again their discipline left something to be desired. Mako Vunipola, sent to the sin-bin last week, was lucky only to be warned for slapping Pieter-Steph du Toit at the bottom of a ruck and by half-time England, for all their pre-match promises, had already conceded seven penalties.
With a kicker like Handré Pollard around it was always going to cost them. Some obstruction at the lineout allowed the Springbok fly-half to drag his side back within two points before a huge 58-metre effort from Pollard punished England’s failure to release on the floor a minute before the break. There was still time for Bongi Mbonambi to crash through a clearly struggling Vunipola, leaving the English management little option but to replace their No 8 with Nathan Hughes for the second-half.
If England were also hoping to exert a fresh measure of control they were instantly disappointed. A half-break from Youngs led only to a loose pass and a concerted spell of South African pressure at the other end, long passes whizzing left and right and the familiar figure of Vermeulen crashing on to short balls from the increasingly involved Willie le Roux.
Itoje and Brad Shields did manage to effect one relieving turnover but the screw was tightening. England could not cope with a series of scrums which led to the month’s least surprising penalty try and, after a potential first Test try for Shields was ruled out by the TMO, England slowly ran out of ideas.
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Even George Ford could not find a solution, getting caught in midfield and throwing a horrible pass to no-one in particular which resulted in three more points for Pollard. It was the signal for Jones to call for Danny Cipriani, bizarrely still trying to prove himself to certain people at the age of 30. England did briefly spark into some semblance of life following the fly-half’s arrival but the series, by now, was in effect gone.
The postmortem will become even messier if England are flattened again at Newlands, raising fresh doubts about the effectiveness of Jones’s training methods and whether or not he can drag things back between now and the World Cup.
At least this tour has proved to be a landmark moment for South Africa, with Siya Kolisi’s historic appointment as captain being gloriously matched by Tendai Mtawarira’s achievement in becoming the first black African to make 100 Test appearances. His nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was also at the stadium on Youth Day, when South Africans remember those killed in the 1976 Soweto uprising.
The divisive racial barriers of old are increasingly being torn down, along with England’s once lofty reputation.