Fair enough if it's about experience. But inexperience can easily be turned into experience, the key to it is estimating your talent properly in then beginning and not getting surprised when inadequate players fail to deliver. Ashtons last 10 caps could have gone to someone else. Burns' New zealand adventure could have helped Slade immensely.
Partially, but not entirely.
Maybe experience is the wrong word. It's about having the right mentality under pressure and, while experience is the best source and improvement for it, it's something some people never gain and some people always have.
To use Ireland as an example, the spine of their pack reads Best-O'Connell-Heaslip. That's probably about 200 caps of international experience between them, maybe six Lions tours, gods knows how many European knock-out games, all won a Grand Slam. huge amounts of captaincy experience... I'm not saying all of these things are necessary, just that they're really good indicators of players who have been through plenty of pressure situations and know what to do and can transmit that to their team mates. They're not the very best players in the Ireland pack, but they offer a huge resource of winning mentality - and of course, its buttressed by all the other guys in the pack who've won European finals, got plenty of caps etc.etc. All of the last three WC winning teams would be good examples too; Wales 2012 GS team had a really experienced tight 5 and could spring Ryan Jones at the end. The exact pattern is not universal but big veteran presences, yeah.
To compare... Hartley's done roughly as much as Best, but his discipline issues do effect him; still he's the sort of leader you need around. In the row... Parling is probably the closest thing we have to a super experienced guy. Love him to bits, but he ain't O'Connell/Thorn/Matfield 07, neither in experience or quality, and probably not mentality. Back row... Robshaw's a decent captain, Wood and Haskell have been around but can't really point at how to win as we'd like.
The story's the same in the backs as well. Not enough caps, not enough winners, not enough people with the right will and knowledge in pressure situations.
Experience can't be gained as quickly as you say. 50 cap veterans don't grow overnight. It's taken Dan Cole, what, 5 years? Correct selection helps, but good luck finding a perfect coach, and good luck finding one with a magic wand for when Ashton's groomed replacements fall down injured at the last moment. Not to forget that not every guy is mentally ready for international rugby aged 20 - Slade might have gained only scars from NZ. There's an interview with Watson in which it says they picked Nowell ahead of him last year because he was more ready mentally. I mean, I'd agree it's a weakness of Lancaster's, but mistakes are part and parcel and there are circumstances of age and injury for which he shouldn't be held hugely responsible.
The experience of winning in pressure situations is even trickier when basically our teams have spent the last gods-knows-how-long as European Cup cannon fodder and when we haven't built up a stock of guys who can do it in international rugby like the Welsh have.
It's a bit of a Catch-22 - you don't get it until you win, but you 'can't' win you get it - but that doesn't mean that it isn't real. We bemoan poor decision making so often - what helps decision making? Experience in pressure situations. If you compare us to most other teams out there that win things, we have a shortage. And therefore, we fall short in pressure situations. Where's the surprise there? Where's the underperformance?
Plus, of course, there's the other side of the coin of experience at international level and that's cohesion. My Best-POC-Heaslip example have a good six years minimum of regularly training and playing together, and that's ignoring the fact that virtually the entire squad comes from their three provinces with the vast majority having spent their entire career there. We draw mainly from five clubs - Bath, Quins, Tigers, Saints and Sarries - with Glaws and Pests minor contributors, and the odd outlier from Exeter, Newcastle and Sale. Probably over half our players have played a fair deal at different clubs as well. We can't build cohesion as easily as Ireland/Wales/NZ/SA/Aus and, well, cohesion matters. I'm not sure how much it matters but it does. It's just a shame most of our club combinations come with fatal flaws.
If you accept that mentality, pressure experience, general experience and cohesiveness are important things, particularly in tight, pressure situations - why be surprised we don't do as well as other teams that have more of those things? I don't think the first half of the sentence is particularly controversial. Yet, for a lot of people, it seems as if the second half is.
And, well, it's not all experience, mentality and what not. Player quality does matter and I just think we're a little short of Ireland at the moment and we're probably only even with Wales because their tight five got hit by the age stick. We are quite markedly short of where we want to be if we want to try being 2003 good again in terms of player quality.
Do not get me wrong - I don't think Lancaster is good enough. I am skeptical as to whether Rowntree is good enough when our maul and breakdown are issues. I don't think Andy Farrell is good enough, although I'm beginning to open my mind on the score. I'm not even fully sure what Mike Catt does. I'm not sure that unit really has enough coaching experience and I think they are blatantly learning on the job. Arguably that means they deserve more time and trust to be able to finish learning and implement. I'm not sure of that.
But it is a shaky hand. That brief flowering in 2010/11 was the best England had done in ages, and even that wasn't amazing. I am still mildly bemused that Lancaster decided to tear down as much of that as he did - but then, in some places, what choice? Flood was injured, Youngs suffering from that knee injury at the WC, plenty of players were done or had one tournament left. From there, he's got to rebuild entirely, while other teams are building on things. Now sure, if Johnson can scrape over the line once, then yeah, Lancaster should have in four gos - but its not hugely surprising he didn't. And Johnson had more experience available.
It is a shaky enough proposition that I don't really like Ian Ritchie strutting around and badmouthing the England coaching team after each window. I wouldn't like it anyway, tbh, but I just don't think his expectations are that grounded in reality. I want Lancaster gone, but publicly undermining him from a situation in which I don't think any English coach would have definitely got what he wanted, is wrong. I want Lancaster gone to have a better coach build a team, but I think we're still building - and I remain skeptical that our overall structure there is really good enough (although talent can overcome structure).
Anyway, I need to pack for my holiday and have quite lost the thread of myself so one final point
- Our longest period without a Grand Slam is 29 years (inc WW2 tbf) followed by 23 years. 12 years is third, only just ahead of the 11 years between 1980 and 1991. Then you get a small spate of Grand Slams, and another 8 years from 1995 to 2003. Our Grand Slams mostly come in clumps - 2 in 1913-14, 4 in 1921-28, and 3 in 1991-1995. We've only won six since WW2. That's our history and standards. What's happening isn't wildly out of line tbh.
Hopefully further detail at some point.
