Former England international Ugo Monye suggested Steve Borthwick’s team were on the verge of a crisis after suffering a fifth successive Test defeat against South Africa that was branded “not good enough”.
England twice let slip a lead against the back-to-back world champions to suffer a 29-20 defeat at Twickenham, coming off the back of disappointing defeats by New Zealand and Australia.
Monye called England’s defending “sloppy” as they coughed up four tries at home, and said that if the national team were not yet in a crisis, they were certainly on the brink of one with only Japan left to pick up a victory this autumn.
“It’s not far off a crisis,” Monye told TNT Sports. “We’re going to end up this Autumn Nations one out of four. That’s awful. When we look at the end of this year, we’d have won four out of 10 matches. For a team that wants to win a World Cup, that was in a World Cup semi-final, that was in a World Cup final the one before – this is so sub-standard from where we expect our team to be.
‘How sloppy were some of those tries?’
“Not enough people is the answer but it isn’t just the last 20 minutes, that opening 20 minutes, how sloppy were some of those tries? Three weekends we’ve found three ways to lose matches this autumn and that’s probably the most frustrating thing. Fundamentally the one common denominator which has been woeful across the last three weeks is our defence is not good enough. It’s not good enough to mix it with the best teams on the planet, with New Zealand, Australia and now the back-to-back world champions. If you concede four tries against South Africa you’re going to struggle. And this was a South Africa side with a yellow card, that couldn’t get out of their half, that were gifted opportunities. We had enough ball and enough territory but we didn’t have enough to get the job done.”
Former England captain Courtney Lawes admitted it was “tough to watch” after seeing Borthwick’s side suffer their seventh defeat of the calendar year.
“Ultimately we’re not cohesive enough as a team,” Lawes added. “We’re not cohesive in defence, we’re not cohesive in attack so we end up on the wrong side of the scoreboard too often.
“This is going to be hard for the boys and it’s really tough to watch to be honest. All they can do is get back up, get back to training next week and try and take a step forward. That’s all you can do at this point, what’s done is done. They have to develop as a team, they’ve got time to do it. It’s disappointing but you’ve got to get back up and go again.”
‘How much time? It’s been two years’
He added: “It’s too early. It’s too early in the year to be a crisis. We’ve got time, it’s always a build-up towards the World Cup and yes, there’s things you want to win between that, but this is the start of a new campaign and we’ve got to give them a chance.”
But Monye disagreed with Lawes’ belief that England have time on their side to develop, and claimed that Borthwick should already be facing difficult questions for the run of defeats.
“How much time? It’s been two years,” said Monye. “We’re not getting enough out of our players. If you look through the team sheet I’m looking at a huge amount of talented players, and for some reason we aren’t getting the maximum potential out of our players. We’re just not. We’re seeing players who are tearing it up for their clubs come into camp with great form and of course international rugby is very different to domestic rugby but for whatever reason we’re not able to reach the potential ceiling that we would expect from this team.
“It has to be fixed before then [the 2025 Six Nations]. We talk about non-negotiables so often – one [win] from four is not acceptable for English rugby. What other option do we have other than going back to the clubs and getting the players to perform well.
“Steve Borthwick has now got a far greater sense of autonomy over the players whether it be conditioning or rest periods and all the rest of it. We will get to the Six Nations of the back of a dismal 2024 and they should be judged at the end of this and they will be judged again because we constantly say we want to be dining at the top table because we should be, because of our finances, because of our player pool, because of the quality, because of the strength of our domestic competition. But four [wins] out of 10 at the end of this year is not what I expect from this team.”