Six Nations 2017: Echoes of the past as Ireland dash English hopes once again
Once again England came to Dublin with a Grand Slam in their sights. Once again they were overwhelmed by an Ireland team playing with a pace and intensity they could not match. A team of champions engulfed in unfamiliar panic, a side untouched in 18 matches turned over by one unbeaten at home for three rollicking years.
England have made unprecedented strides under Eddie Jones, been transformed from the nearly-men of the Six Nations and the never-weres of the 2015 World Cup to back-to-back title winners and joint world record holders.
This soggy Saturday evening exposed just how far they might still have to go. Jones, his ultimate target the next World Cup in 2019, had wanted to see what his side were like under World Cup-like pressure. The answer was as clear as the skies overhead were murky.
England's champions of 2003 held strong in the last critical moments of extra time in Sydney in part because they had failed to do so at Lansdowne Road, Murrayfield and Wembley in decisive battles that came before.
Maybe this England side will be the same. Better for it to happen here than in Japan in three years' time, came the co-ordinated message afterwards.
That's the hope, for the white-shirted supporters who came across the Irish Sea with great expectations and left with familiar regrets, if not always the logic.
There is no golden sporting treaty that painful defeats must automatically be followed by redemptive triumphs. England's team that won a title but lost a Slam in Ireland six years ago stumbled out of the World Cup in the quarter-finals five months later, undisciplined and unloved. The side that went to Cardiff in 2013 with the same clean sweep in their sights were taken apart that night and then collapsed again in the crunch contests in the ill-fated autumn of 2015.
For all that Jones has done, for all those wins that piled up, this was a chastening way for his own first epoch to close.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-union/39318149
England have made unprecedented strides under Eddie Jones, been transformed from the nearly-men of the Six Nations and the never-weres of the 2015 World Cup to back-to-back title winners and joint world record holders.
This soggy Saturday evening exposed just how far they might still have to go. Jones, his ultimate target the next World Cup in 2019, had wanted to see what his side were like under World Cup-like pressure. The answer was as clear as the skies overhead were murky.
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England's champions of 2003 held strong in the last critical moments of extra time in Sydney in part because they had failed to do so at Lansdowne Road, Murrayfield and Wembley in decisive battles that came before.
Maybe this England side will be the same. Better for it to happen here than in Japan in three years' time, came the co-ordinated message afterwards.
That's the hope, for the white-shirted supporters who came across the Irish Sea with great expectations and left with familiar regrets, if not always the logic.
There is no golden sporting treaty that painful defeats must automatically be followed by redemptive triumphs. England's team that won a title but lost a Slam in Ireland six years ago stumbled out of the World Cup in the quarter-finals five months later, undisciplined and unloved. The side that went to Cardiff in 2013 with the same clean sweep in their sights were taken apart that night and then collapsed again in the crunch contests in the ill-fated autumn of 2015.
For all that Jones has done, for all those wins that piled up, this was a chastening way for his own first epoch to close.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-union/39318149