2007 vibes all over it. This is from the post RWC 2007 review in a Guardian article, and it could almost be written today but with different coach and player names- scarily accurate:
"So many harsh words have been flying around English rugby in the past 10 days that someone was bound to get caught in the crossfire. Unlike Mike Catt and Lawrence Dallaglio, Olly Barkley has not written a book but he certainly deserves a share of their royalties. As Dallaglio acknowledges, no one summed up England's World Cup pool stage travails more succinctly than Barkley - "Look, Brian, no one's got a f****** clue how we're supposed to be playing here" - during the fateful meeting after the 36-0 drubbing by South Africa.
Barkley's life would have been easier had Dallaglio phoned him in advance to ask if he was happy to be quoted directly slagging off the England head coach, Brian Ashton. Instead the 25-year-old Bath fly-half was outed without his consent and yesterday, for the first time, he chose to elaborate. If those responsible for the World Cup review are seeking an honest eye-witness appraisal from a player with aspirations to be involved in New Zealand in 2011, they should read on.
Interestingly, for a start, Barkley does not retract a syllable of his heartfelt plea - "If you ask the 15 guys who played against South Africa to write down the game plan, you'd get 15 different answers" - to Ashton the day after the Springbok fiasco. If anything he is glad he spoke out. "Ideally I'd have liked to have been asked before the comment was used. And if I'd said it behind closed doors and Lawrence had repeated it [in his book] I'd have been slightly put out. But in fairness to Lol it was a comment anyone could have picked up on. It was a very open and honest meeting. He hasn't changed my words or exaggerated them. I felt it was the truth at that stage and I'm not going to back down from it. I'd like to think it went some way towards changing what was going wrong."
Yet listening to Barkley, as with Catt and Dallaglio, there is no question that the entire squad felt compelled to intervene to steer the good ship England away from the jagged rocks. "We felt teams were defending against us far too easily," says Barkley. "We weren't stretching them out nearly enough. We needed more variation in our game. It wasn't a case of saying, 'Let's wait and see.' We were in the middle of a World Cup in which we could have gone home during the pool stages. I didn't want that to happen and nor did Catty or Jonny Wilkinson or several others."
Significantly, too, Barkley backs Catt's assessment that Ashton, a coach they both knew well from Bath, found it harder than he expected to cope with the top role. "I agree with most of what Catty says. Brian is a great attacking coach and he gives players the freedom to express themselves. But as a head coach you are asked to take on an awful lot. When you are asked to do more than you usually do it can have an impact on the way you coach.
"I'm not saying Brian was bad at it, only that it's an incredibly hard job. When he came back to Bath we played some great rugby under him but we already had certain structures in place. It was a massive ask for Brian to bring together a new group of players and coaches in a big year for England."
Furthermore Barkley believes England's analysis of other teams was not rigorous enough. "I don't believe in this country that we're tremendously good at analysing opponents and playing accordingly. Australians, in contrast, seem to be superb at it, probably the best in the world." That might seem a curious conclusion after the Wallabies' defeat in the World Cup quarter-final in Marseille but Barkley is no tactical novice. Catt reveals that his younger colleague came up with "pretty well all of the moves" once the team opted to change tack for the Samoa game and the fly-half-cum-centre, naively perhaps, is not shy of openly questioning whether the present coaching structure needs adjustment.
"Where has Brian been successful in the past?" he asks rhetorically. "It's been when he has been asked to coach the attack. Mike Catt's big thing is to get people playing to their strengths, and coaches are no different. You wouldn't ask Mike Ford to coach the attack or ask Brian simply to look after the defence and the media. Moving forward, everyone has to be clear what they're doing."
As yet Barkley has not rung Ashton to explain all this personally. First he has his Bath place to worry about; the dead leg which cost him a possible World Cup final appearance is now virtually healed but South Africa's Butch James has arrived at the Rec and competition for Barkley's preferred No10 jersey is intense. Like everyone, though, he is watching the England situation closely. "We need to work out where we're falling short very quickly because the Six Nations and summer tours will soon come around. I'm sure there'll be certain changes but I don't know where. That's Rob Andrew's job and I've every confidence in him making the right calls. It comes back to consistency and clarity of coaching and selection. Players simply want to know where they stand."
Dressing-room tension:
Catt
"When we got back to our hotel [after the win over the US] the players were very down. I sat up with Olly Barkley, who had been our best player, until 2.30am, talking about how we could put it right against the Springboks. We came up with a game plan we believed would work. The question was whether we could convince the coaches to implement it"
Dallaglio
"It was a tough meeting for Brian, something you realised when you heard Olly Barkley, who had worked with him at Bath, say: 'Look, Brian, no one's got a f****** clue how we're supposed to be playing here. If you ask the 15 guys who played against South Africa to write down the game plan, you'd get 15 different answers.' It was harsh, but it was true."
Catt
"Between us we devised a playing system, though it was Olly Barkley who came up with pretty well all the moves. On the Monday [after losing 36-0 to South Africa] we began practising what we had preached."
It was only going down to 12 men, when the pre meditated game plan went out the window that we began to look anything like dangerous. All of a sudden the physicality and intensity that you expect from England at Twickenham began to drip-feed back.
The one good thing is that at least 4 warm up games have really exposed the issues to give an opportunity to be addressed.
