Andrew Mehrtens: ‘It’s time for England to make up their minds’

One of the criticisms of England going into the 2025 Six Nations is that they haven’t settled on a clear way to attack and a clear way to defend. England remain a conundrum, a team that could quite easily finish fourth or fifth, but could also potentially go all the way and win their first title since 2020.

Much depends on the outcome of Saturday’s clash against the reigning champions Ireland, and whether they can dance to the same tune as Marcus Smith, the latest in a long line of England fly-halves to divide opinion, who won the game so dramatically when the sides met at Allianz Stadium Twickenham last March.

All Blacks legend Andrew Mehrtens can take a dispassionate viewpoint and he reasons that for England to prosper, they need to decide whether to go all in and back Smith’s attack-minded, give-it-a-go approach or play to type and be more conservative. At the moment, he feels, England’s game plan is stuck in no man’s land.

“I don’t think England really know what sort of team they want to be. They have got such tradition there of being strong and structured and very correct and then you have got a free spirit like Marcus Smith who is unbelievable when he is on, and it is not just him when he is on, when players around him are responding to him, they can do anything," the 70-cap All Black said.

“You look at what they did to the All Blacks at the end of 2022. In that last 20 minutes, they basically ran them off the park. So I think the challenge is not for Marcus Smith to necessarily do anything, it is for the team to get used to him. I think they’ll only do that with more time on the field with him, if he gets more responsibility, and England says, ‘Hey, look, we can play this way, we’ve got the reins with Marcus and our responsibility is to kind of support him'."

Mehrtens, 51, believes England’s dilemma is similar to the one Northampton faced when they signed his flashier fly-half rival, Carlos Spencer, in 2005.

“It is kind of similar to Northampton when Carlos Spencer arrived, it took them a while to work out how to play alongside that style of fly-half. New Zealand teams had gotten used to him. Auckland had guys like Doug Howlett and whatnot. They knew what Carlos was like, they knew they just had to get around him, let him make his decisions and get up and offer support as much as possible.

"I think that’s similar to what England probably needs to do with Marcus Smith – and decide that they are going to be an attacking team rather than a conservative team. That’ll bring out the likes of Ben Earl and those sorts of players, who I think are fantastic.”

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