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Borthwick reveals how Farrell reacted to getting benched by England
By Liam Heagney
Steve Borthwick has explained how Owen Farrell reacted this week to his demotion from the England starting team to face France this Saturday at Twickenham. The head coach had named the Saracens player as the Test team’s skipper when he originally named his Guinness Six Nations squad in January and Farrell went on to lead the side in the February matches against Scotland, Italy and Wales.
The latter two of those appearances came at No10 as he was switched into that position from inside centre in place of the benched Marcus Smith after the pair had initially combined as the starting England 10/12 for the opening round loss versus Scotland.
Borthwick has now had another selection rethink, though, ahead of the round four clash versus France and it was at 1:30pm on Thursday when the RFU confirmed that Smith would wear the No10 jersey this weekend - with Farrell dropping to the replacements and acting as the No22 bench backup.
Asked at his follow-up media briefing about how Farrell had taken the news of his England demotion, Borthwick explained: “Owen has been brilliant, he always is. He trains brilliantly, he leads this team fantastically well whatever role he is put in and he has been incredible this week.
“I can’t praise Owen enough, not just for this week but every day since we started working together in this capacity. Owen has been just an incredible trainer, an incredible help with all the players around the squad - he cares so deeply about this team. Owen is a player who has incredible respect from everyone attached to the England rugby team.”
Borthwick clarified that Farrell will retake the England captaincy as soon as he is introduced from the bench on Saturday. “Ellis Genge is captaining the team for the first time and I’m delighted for him as he is a fantastic leader. We are blessed with brilliant leaders in this squad.
“Unfortunately, Courtney Lawes had to leave the squad this week due to injury, another brilliant leader, so Ellis will captain the team at the start of the game and then Owen will captain the team when he comes onto the pitch."
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Soccer on a rugby forum…
“Experience is strongly correlated with age, at least among the managers that I named”…
Slot and Arteta are among the youngest you named. They have the least experience as a manager (6 years each). Espírito Santo and Pep are the oldest and have the most (12 years + each). Pep is pushing 17 years experience, all at elite level. There are plenty around his age that won’t have the same level of experience. Plenty.
The younger breed you mentioned (Arteta in particular) may not coach at elite level beyond the next few years if they continue to not win trophies. Age and experience is not always a nice, steady gradient.
The only trend in English soccer is that managers don’t stay on as long with the same club. Due to the nature of the game and the assumed, immediate performance bounce of replacing them at the first sign of trouble. Knee-jerk style. Test rugby has no clear pattern of that.
Why would you dismiss a paradox? Contradictions are often revealing. Or is that too incoherent?
Go to commentsYou can’t compare the “quality”of competitions till they play against each other … what we do know is that nz teams filled with ABs and ABs can go at it with anyone in the world and these other teams and players are competing so would say the quality is high wouldn’t you? How are you determining that URC or top 14 is higher quality than Super I’m guessing you mean in the quality of players and execution ? Are you just assuming that it is because…. I would say it’s much of a muchness and the only indicator for that is international rugby and that is hella even
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