Andy Farrell won’t lose sleep as Steve Borthwick moves into hottest seat in rugby
Steve Borthwick’s nose tells a story all of its own.
he new England coach spent the first chapter of his adult life in the trenches as a hard-working, unglamorous lineout specialist, who spent half of his time with his head between the cheeks of his props and the rest with it in the face of the opposition.
He was an obdurate opponent; not of the same class as some of his rivals and opponents but good enough to live in their company. You don’t win 57 caps for England and play nearly 300 club matches for Bath and Saracens without being a tough cookie.
Andy Farrell was a senior player alongside Borthwick at Sarries and worked under Eddie Jones, while they coached together as part of Warren Gatland’s team on the 2017 Lions tour.
So, Farrell will go into next year’s Six Nations knowing what Borthwick brings to the table.
England, however, are not front and centre of Farrell’s mind.
The sides don’t meet until the final round of games on March 18 and Borthwick will be back in Dublin for the World Cup warm-up game in August.
The first chance they have to encounter each other in France is at the semi-final stage.
History tells us that England can derail Ireland’s World Cup dreams without ever meeting at the tournament and Borthwick and Farrell were assistants in 2019 when Jones’ side inflicted a pair of blows to Joe Schmidt’s team’s solar plexus from which they never recovered.
Yet there are limitations to what any coach can achieve in such a narrow time-frame.
He is inheriting a very strong squad that has been underperforming, one he knows inside out from his time working as Jones’ forwards coach and his work with Leicester Tigers in the Premiership.
He is known as an assiduous, serious man with the charisma to drive a group of players forward and take them with him.
He’s worked at international level as an assistant at Japan and England under Jones and then became his own man at Leicester. Success has always followed.
Publicly, he’s a taciturn figure whose encounters with the media come across as disdainful. It’s one thing doing that as an assistant or a club coach, quite another when you’re the main man.
No one in Leicester seemed to care about that when he restored the Tigers to their old glories during his two-and-a-half-year spell at the club.
Nor did they mind that they played the kind of rugby that Borthwick’s predecessor Jones once derided as ‘kick and clap’ when he was talking about Schmidt’s Ireland.
Borthwick’s style is deeply pragmatic.
Leicester have a strong scrum, an excellent lineout and they kick the ball a lot.
He works closely with the ‘Oval Insights’ analysis firm and embraces the numbers-based approach. If the stats show that playing rugby in your own half gets you into trouble, then Borthwick felt no obligation to entertain as Ben Youngs and George Ford went to the air.
In the short term, it could reap big rewards, and considering the time-frame, Borthwick will be forgiven for adopting a streamlined approach of just going back to English basics. Should Ireland be worried?
Well, they’ve banked three years of progress under Farrell and are the world’s No 1-ranked side. Yesterday, Borthwick said his new team are not in the top three in the world in any one area of the game, so he’s playing catch-up while Farrell and Co are refining their game.
Are England dangerous? Certainly, and with both coaches set to continue through to the 2027 World Cup, the dynamic between them will be fascinating – especially when Farrell is also the father of one of Borthwick’s most senior players.
But for former Ireland flanker Stephen Ferris, Ireland just need to focus on themselves.
“Steve Borthwick has coached a lot of those England players before, he’s probably not going to change that much,” the ViaPlay pundit said ahead of their coverage of Friday’s game between Connacht and Ulster.
“His job is to get them back on track and I think he’s got a bloody good chance to do that. I think the only threat to Ireland is themselves.
“If we start to get ahead of ourselves as we did in 2011 when everyone was talking us up as the best team on paper . . . we definitely got ahead of ourselves and didn’t turn up against Wales.
“Ireland have the ship sailing in the right direction, it feels different this time.”
So, while he’ll respect what Borthwick brings, Farrell won’t lose any sleep over his arrival.
For the new England coach, he’ll need a hard neck to go with that well-trodden nose as he takes his ice-cold demeanour into the hottest seat of them all.
