The response to TNT’s inaugural outing as broadcaster for the autumn Tests seems to have been positive, largely due to a familiar crew not feeling a need to overly explain the basics and instead giving the audience lots of data and analysis to chew through. In the wake of England’s third loss of the autumn came another first for the broadcaster almost by accident; a potentially viral clip of two of their matchday pundits having a passionate debate, which for those of you also raised on a diet of Super Sunday on Sky Sports will have felt familiar.
The most English of responses if someone, in this case Craig Doyle, asks you “is this is a crisis” is to probably play it down as much as possible while internally nodding vigorously. Which is why the discussion which took place between Courtney Lawes and Ugo Monye – one freshly retired from England duty and still naturally loyal to players and staff while also trying to tell it straight; the other now a veteran broadcaster who, perhaps due to occasionally working as the presenter, can sometimes simply feel like a safe pair of hands – was quite enjoyable.
After potentially the longest three-second pause TNT has ever broadcast following Doyle’s crisis question, when Monye began to respond “yeah…”, you sat up and took notice. Lawes was not even meant to answer – looking at Monye, microphone lowered – before he jumped in to say “it’s too early in the year”. By year Lawes presumably meant in the World Cup cycle, given England’s 12th and final Test of the year takes place against Japan next Sunday.
“We’ve got time, there is always a build-up to the World Cup. This is the start of a new campaign and you have to give them a chance,” Lawes continued, and he has a point. Except there are two problems; fans paying into three figures for a Twickenham ticket would like to see some wins between those tournaments. The promise of 2027, nice as it sounds, is not enough to satisfy people in the interim when the team is on a run of four wins from 11 Tests in 2024. Not forgetting that England have won just one of the 10 World Cups so far and that happened 21 years ago.
Which is probably why Monye cut in with “it’s not far off a crisis though, Courtney”, half a smile creeping across Lawes’ face as he listened, probably in the same way he smiled before rearranging the rib cage of France fly-half Jules Plisson. Monye, perhaps emboldened by his handlebar facial hair for Movember, refreshingly pushed this point hard.
“We’re going to end up this Autumn Nations one out of four. That’s awful. When we look at the end of this year, we’d have won four out of 10 matches. For a team that wants to win a World Cup, that was in a World Cup semi-final, that was in a World Cup final the one before – this is sub-standard from where we expect our team to be.”
Lawes, to his credit, was not merely a cheerleader. In response he stressed that England are “nowhere near” when it comes to their defensive cohesion. “We’re nowhere near any double tackles, we’re falling off tackles left, right and centre, and that’s not good enough”, adding that England can “fix these things given a bit of time”.
Few expected England to beat South Africa but it’s the nature of the defeats beforehand this autumn and in New Zealand over the summer which has meant that losing to the Springboks has seemed to shift the mood against this side. “Sometimes it looks good, sometimes it looks awful,” Doyle chimed in. He sort of nailed it.
“How much time?” Monye pushed back at Lawes. “We’re not getting enough out of our players. I’m looking at a huge amount of talented players, and for some reason we aren’t getting the maximum potential out of our players,” he then responded when asked who was to blame, stressing that England “constantly say we want to be dining at the top table… because of our finances, our player pool, the quality, the strength of our domestic competition”. And despite those ambitions, look at England’s record.
It was a welcome sight not to have two former England internationals be blindingly optimistic and instead contest each other’s points. Monye was bang on the money. Maybe the moustache needs to stay.
