Stats reveal how England are actually getting worse - Beyond 80
Duhan van der Merwe's first try against England was the turning point for Scotland in their fourth successive Calcutta Cup win, but looking at the tournament statistics we can see that England might be in a bit of trouble.
Van der Merwe went on to score a hat-trick as Murrayfield witnessed a 30-21 win against their rivals.
"That was the key turning point for the game because up until that point, England had looked to play with a lot more attacking vigour than we've seen from them for a number of years," said Ben Kay on the latest episode of Beyond 80.
"It just got into the psyche, that element of doubt that they didn't quite know what they were doing, maybe just meant that there was a hesitation. We started to see passes not quite going to hand, or up at a shoulder.
"We saw players hesitating on a line and that made it much more difficult to read for those trying to get them the ball and England just started to make error after error and Scotland realised this, and felt 'We didn't have to play that much'.
"You saw that a lot of Scotland's tries after that came from errors from England and Duhan van der Merwe obviously the man that had an absolute field day."
While England started well with a try by George Furbank, analyst Ross Hamilton explains that key statistics throughout the tournament show where England have been lacking.
"That's the first try that England have scored from the first phase in this tournament. So yes that looked good and that looked sharp, but it didn't necessarily continue that way.
"England have only made 14 line breaks in the tournament so far, only Italy have made fewer. Our [England's] big issue was converting the chances when we get them. We've actually had the second most entries into the opposition 22m of any team, but we have the worst red zone efficiency - points per entry - just 1.75.
"So we're making opportunities yes, but we just can't convert, and that seems to be England's big problem."
The other big problem for England is their increasing error rate, clearly now a big concern for the England camp.
"One of the big things that contributes to that is the amount of errors that we made. We had 22 turnovers conceded, that's the most of any team in any game so far, and actually we've regressed as we've gone on.
"Steve Borthwick talks about getting better week on week and the more we've been in camp the more cohesive we might get, yet we made 10 errors in the first round, 13 in the second and 22 in round 3. So we've just got a little bit worse as it's gone on, and that's been a big factor in us not being able to take our chances."
Beyond 80 have done a full in-depth technical analysis of that match as well as the other two in round 3, which you can watch exclusively on RugbyPass TV or the RugbyPass Youtube channel.
Latest Comments
Why 50 why not 5000? I mean the OS clubs are just going to decimate the pipeline in NZ and go all open season right?
Do you really think that highly of being NZ born that all OS clubs will just gamble on player contracts and players to perform without seeing they talents being tested? Realistically OS would not be taking players from NPC or SR but those who are already ok in ABs 23
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On face value it's 3, but not if you look at ACT rugby stats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_union_in_Australia
The 23/24 stats are incomplete, but for 21/2 it was:
Below is the breakdown of registered players in Australia by region:
NSW – 58,940
Qld – 44,266
WA – 12,253
Vic – 12,135
SA – 3,793
ACT – 3,120
NT – 2,966
Tas – 1,598
Hard to justify ACT on any count....except performance 😁
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