I achieved something special today. I listened to an interview with the former Scottish rugby union player Gavin Hastings and managed to stay awake throughout. His dull, flat monotone was at work again when he was asked his opinion about the England team selection for their world cup game this week against Wales. Given his glittering career in coaching and management since he retired from playing nearly 20 years ago – well, he is involved in sports marketing and that’s almost the same thing, isn’t it? – his opinion on the axing of George Ford and selection of rugby league convert Sam Burgess surely counts for something. “I think they have panicked with the selection”, he declared.
Stuart Lancaster, the England head coach, really doesn’t look like the type of man to panic, does he? He exudes a calm, thoughtful presence over the squad and in the unlikely event Lancaster loses his marbles, I should imagine his fellow coaches Andy Farrell and Graham Rowntree, both Lions coaching veterans, would be the first people to calm matters down.
Hastings’s suggestion is that Lancaster doesn’t know what he is doing and he goes a step further when adding, “I think Warren Gatland will be laughing all the way to Twickenham.”
It does not take a rocket scientist or indeed a rugby expert, to work out why Owen Farrell and Sam Burgess have been called up. Gatland’s Wales team is based on physicality, of charging up the middle, battering teams to bits. Farrell and, Burgess are large specimens who will not back down. Oh and they can play a bit too. I may be wrong, but Lancaster does know a thing or two about rugby union. Maybe not as much as a former Scotland full back who has never coached a proper team, I grant you, but he has got a decent track record.
If Hastings’ argument was a touch flimsy, he could probably have done without the backing of Stuart Barnes who has said that leaving out George Ford “is the wrong call”. Of course he does: Ford plays for Bath. He would say that, wouldn’t he?
But it is Hastings, the mogadon man from north of the border, whose words I find most irritating and if he has done anyone a service it is the entire England team, and indeed nation, by painting a picture of the ever smug Warren Gatland “laughing all the way to Twickenham”.
The image I prefer is of Gatland and his beaten team climbing on that team bus this Saturday night, crying all the way back to Cardiff. From the way he spoke this afternoon, Hastings might be feeling the same way if England win.
