All this talk about Twelvetrees is reminding me of Welshglory's point about cohesion, which I think we all mostly agreed was right.
The increased need for cohesion means international sides need to be more like club sides; they need to select from as small a pool of players as possible to help build up the levels of understanding. It also means sticking with out of form players and letting them play their way back into form a lot of the time. You're hoping that the out of form player's cohesion with everyone else will counterbalance the possible gains of picking a more in form player until such time as the player is back in form and offering both. Obviously you can take that to illogical extremes very easily, and in an ideal world the small pool of players contains enough options that you can pick the form player from among them, but in general the principle sticks. The purpose of an international team is not to reward the 15 form players in the top flight, it is to beat other sides, and that requires as much continuity as possible.
All this talk of being angry if Twelvetrees gets picked, giving up on his potential, reckoning Barritt's overtaken him... this, to me, is the sort of thinking that Welshglory was criticising. "Chopping and changing in the name of form". Twelvetrees has been out of form now, for, what? Half a season? Two test windows? That's nothing in the context of his whole career really. How are we meant to build cohesion if we give up on a player when he has a bad season? I feel that goes double for creative players, as a) failures in form are more notable in the players trying to do more b) a lot of creative players go through prolonged patchiness for a lot of their career as they work on their decision making, and if you don't back them, they're not going to do it.
I get that this is not an entirely fair thing to say; Twelvetrees' time in the sun as a top flight player is short enough to leave one in doubt as to whether he is the real deal or not, whether the patchiness is in fact the real player. But we just dismiss Twelvetrees, what next? Burrell, too, has mixed good with bad. Joseph flits around the England scene - he's just coming off a fairly indifferent season to have a scorching one. Do we play him this season, then drop him again if he's bad the next one? We are not going to get anywhere if we are unwilling to take gambles on players with talent and just cycle through players until we find a freak who is rock steady right from the beginning of his international career.
I know some of you were unconvinced by Twelvetrees' 6N performances; fair enough to not rate him now. But everyone who did think he showed something then but are dismissing him now are, imo, guilty of a knee-jerk reaction.
Problem is, we've blooded so many players a little that there's too many players who've shown the potential to be worth keeping to actually keep them all. Hard to know how you give both Twelvetrees and Eastmond, Burrell and Joseph a fair shot - while still having room for Tuilagi (when fit) and exploring the possibility of Slade (who might be that freakishly good player).
I agree to a point, but not the full way. Continuity is important, and if you have to pick between a marginally more in form player and the player that provides continuity, then obviously go with the continuity option.
However, IMO you don't improve continuity by sticking with players that are hopelessly out of form and are showing no signs its a blip (e.g. like Care's Autumn seems like a blip). A problem of both MJ and Lancaster has been sticking with players purely out of blind faith that they will return to their former highs. The justification is continuity, but invariably what happens is that it gets to a point that the player is clearly not going to improve, and you cut the replacement's opportunity for game time by many caps.
For example, May is the form and continuity option now. But it wasn't just a vocal minority that was calling for Ashton (or the fullback-on-the-wing) to be replaced by May far earlier into Lancaster's reign. Lancaster used continuity to justify Ashton's continual appearance in the England XV. We're in a much happier place now that we have broken that continuity, but we could have integrated May/Watson a lot earlier than they had been,
improving continuity.
Same with Twelvetrees. He's been out of form much longer than he has been a viable England player. The longer we delay dropping him, the less opportunity the replacement has to come in and make a mark. I suppose we could keep Twelvetrees training in the wider squad so that he can come back in later if he does have an upturn in form, but whilst he keeps having these brain farts that can singly lose England matches, then the match day squad is not an option IMO.
Also, for me, what's important is that the spine of the team stays the same, not that every individual does. England have a strong spine at this point: Marler (or Corbs), Hartley, Webber, Wilson, Cole, Launchbury, Lawes, Parling, Attwood, Wood, Robshaw, Morgan, Vunipola, Care, Youngs, Ford, Farrell, Tuilagi, May, Watson, Brown. The vast majority of the XV are filled up with players that have been integrated into Lancaster's set up for a long time. Two or three new faces at this point - Kvesic, Slade and Joseph for me - shouldn't be too much of a problem.
