‘Let’s have a go’: Jon Callard’s kicking plea to England

If a rugby ball was a can, England wouldn’t just kick it down the alley, they’d kick it down the whole estate. Worrying about how to make the best use of their attacking talents is for another day. For now, there are games of rugby to be won, box kick away.

For every three passes (I’m being generous as 2.6 doesn’t sound quite right, England kick the ball in open play. By contrast, Scotland’s kick-to-pass ratio in the Calcutta Cup match was 1:10.

One team views rugby union as the handling code, the other has gone back to rugby football in the truest sense of the word. England have kicked the ball in open play 114 times for a total of 2,858 metres – that’s almost half the length of the Boat Race, and we’re not talking drinking games here.

Given what has transpired over the last month, you’d think someone like Jon Callard would have been getting his kicks out of England’s tactics.

But the former England full-back turned kicking coach, who spent nearly a decade on the RFU payroll, believes England are turning people off from a part of the game, if done well, that can add to the entertainment.

“Putting my professional hat on as a kicking expert, so to speak, it doesn’t seem to be integrated into the whole of the game, it seems to sit out on its own rather than being part of the overall plan. It doesn’t seem to have any flow,” he points out.

“They’re winning great ball, turnover ball and then they’re box kicking it. No! Let’s have a go. I would like us to play at pace and kick on the front foot more, not slow the game down.

“We can always come back to the fact we have a right and left-footed kicker and we can go long with a chase team, and then let them kick back to us and we can play off kick return against an unstructured defence.

“At the moment they go off the top, hit up the middle, stop, box kick it. It’s like another set-piece and the defence can set itself. We’re slowing the game down when we’ve got good momentum, to box kick.”

As well as working for the RFU and the England senior team as a kicking coach, Callard has had spells with Sale Sharks, Romania and was at his former club Bath, where he’s still revered for his exploits as a player, until last March.

The five-times capped international has also fulfilled head coach roles at Bath and Leeds but kicking has always been his passion – it was his boot, on top of scoring Bath’s only try, that saw them beat Brive to become the first English winners of the European Cup in 1998.

“The attacking game in rugby is made up of run-kick-pass. You take out one of those things, or slow it down, and then the defence only has two things to worry about. All those things go into the attack. When you think about it, we should be bubbling over with excitement because we have Fin Smith, Marcus Smith, great exponents of the attacking kicking game, Henry Slade is a great exponent of the attacking kicking game. So it is all there, it is just linking it all together

“I love the game and that element of the game and have taken a lot of s*** for it. When I first started off, people were like, ‘Oh, you’re going to kick the ball away’, they didn’t understand the value of kicking – kicking to score from crossfield kicks, kicking. to play off turnover, territory kicks, etc. etc.

“Slowly, things are now changing. Like at the weekend (Wales vs Ireland), (Jamison) Gibson-Park’s kick, what a brilliant kick that was. James Lowe knocks it back and Jamie Osborne scores his first international try.

“Fin Smith against France, he steps one, comes back and almost rugby league style, he’s put it on Louis Bielle-Biarrey, who was like he had concrete in his shoes. He couldn’t go up, he had no time to attack the ball, so (Tommy) Freeman was in the ascendency to win the ball. It was a brilliant kick.”

While critical of England’s approach to box kicking, Callard understands the end sometimes justifies the means, and you won’t find him bagging the team he represented fleetingly in the 1990s for squeaking home by a point, against France and then Scotland.

Callard, 59, believes Steve Borthwick is suffering from the ‘Gareth Southgate’ syndrome by a glass half-empty public, and should be cut some slack as they chase down four wins in a Six Nations championship for the first time in five years.

“I, along with Andy Robinson, signed Steve Borthwick (as a player at Bath) and got on very well with Steve. I like him as a bloke, I like him as a personality, and (defence coach) Joe El Abd was with me at Bath, too, he gave up football, he came into rugby and threw everything into it. I have got a lot of time for the guys.

“I am thinking, ‘What is it about English rugby? This isn’t new, it has been going on for donkey’s years. If we win well, it’s why didn’t we win by more? If we just scrape through, it’s we were lucky. There seems to be an inordinate amount of extra pressure being involved with England than it seems with other nations.

“I don’t know whether that is because it is the biggest Union and people have this expectation. Look at Gareth Southgate, who is a friend of mine from up here (North Yorkshire). He did an amazing job with England, an amazing job with how he turned them around. But at the end of the day, people said it still wasn’t good enough.

“We’re building a new young team and it takes time to learn the dark arts, how to win tight games. You have got to find ways of adapting. I think what England are going through at the moment should stand them in good stead. But I think the kicking game is not helping them at the moment.”

Callard added: “I am pro England, I am pro the boys coaching.  If I was in the camp now, as a coach or a player, I’d be like, ‘We’ve won two games, brilliant’. I wouldn’t have been looking at how the possible outcomes could have been different. We never thought like that at Bath, we won the game and moved on and tried to get better.

“The will and the want of the players and the coaching staff to fight and win and get results is brilliant in itself. No team has a god given right to win, sport isn’t like that anymore and I think rugby is more even than it has been.

“A one-point win in the last minute of a game is more fruity for me than putting 60 points on somebody, because you’ve found a way and you’ve nicked it and you don’t give them any time to get back and win.

“I was speaking with my old mucker Nigel Redman on the phone about it – Bath were very good at it. We found ways of winning. We’d have a dire 75 minutes and we’d be looking at each other but somehow we found a way to win. It wasn’t always by scoring five/six tries, running them in from here, there and everywhere, a lot of it was the unseen stuff, working hard and grinding it out.

“It becomes easier to move forward when you’ve won, you can be more critical. The review meeting won’t be treading on egg shells, they have won a game so they can go in there and be hard hitting with each other, saying, we can do this better, let’s get the ball in Ollie Lawrence’s hands and then go wide-wide, and then see what we can do with our kicking game.”