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Siya Kolisi and Rassie Erasmus assess England's future
By Josh Raisey
South Africa captain Siya Kolisi has assured England that it will “come right for them,” saying the double world champions have been through a similar period.
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Kolisi led his side to a hard-fought 20-29 victory over England at Twickenham’s Allianz Stadium on Saturday, but it was not necessarily a match that looked like the world number ones playing the seventh-ranked team in the world who have won one of their last seven matches.
Steve Borthwick’s side looked promising at times, but ultimately did not have enough in the final 20 minutes of the match, which has been the case all November.
But Kolisi offered the struggling outfit some encouragement after the match, insisting that they should continue what they are doing.
Prior to his first match as captain – against England in 2018 – the Springboks had only won three of their previous nine Test matches, including a 57-0 loss to the All Blacks. The shellacking at the hands of New Zealand aside, there were some results that didn’t look too dissimilar to England’s now. Two two-point defeats, one loss by a single point and two draws came before they turned a corner.
That means Kolisi is well-qualified to offer these words of hope to England, who will look to arrest their losing streak against Japan on Sunday.
“We’ve been through this period as well,” the double World Cup-winning captain said. “If you give up, you’re never going to make it out of it. You’ve just got to keep on going. It’s tough, it’s really tough, but it really helped us and pulled us together as a group. We had certain goals and we reached those goals.
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“The motivation comes from within us. We don’t look for outside motivation.
“It will come right for them as long as they just keep on going.”
Head coach Rassie Erasmus was in agreement with his captain, who took the opportunity post-match to explain his comments about Borthwick being “under pressure” before their meeting in London.
“I’m still nervous that my words will get twisted in a headline or something like that, so I would like to explain the whole thing,” Erasmus said.
“Coaches will say ‘he’s under pressure’ with Borthwick, but I’d just like to say that we’ve been there. What you normally do then is you fall back to what you know is a go-to and you know work. We had a good feeling that he would probably go back to Freddie Steward.
“I think with this team, they’ve had three southern hemisphere teams now and took them close to the last 10 minutes. I think if they keep what they’re doing… We found it tough to break them down.”
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I totally agree with both Siya and Rassie.
England needs a few tweaks and you only ever learn by your mistakes. To say that, after the losses they have suffered with small margins, they are going backwards, is ingoring the fact that they lost against very good teams whom all have had to face the dilemma. To the contrary, it means they are really close to the winning formula.
They only have to work on 15 man defence. They are very good at the forwards defensive game. Their attack looks impressive with Marcus as their playmaker. They need to find the right centre pairing. That was key to the Boks, Kiwis, Ireland and even France.
They will get there.
Firing Borthwick will put them back and they will never get there before 2027. They need to get a similar defence coach as Felix J. He was a huge loss to the potential that England has. The missing link. His departure was the single biggest set-back for their potential.