It’s time to stop the painful self-analysis. Cut the crap. Get out there and fry the French.
That’s captain Martin Johnson’s team orders before Sunday’s hit-or-bust World Cup semifinal against France.
Asked if he thought England and their 18-strong coaching team were doing too much talking and not enough playing, Johnson said: ”Good point, I’ll forward that on. We’re sitting here saying, ‘Oh, we haven’t played well’, but Wales would love to have won that game.
”When I was a kid, we hadn’t beaten Wales for years.
We’re in a World Cup semifinal, let’s be upbeat about it.
”We’ve got to raise the stakes for the semifinal but the games so far have had passion and emotion.
”We had to battle against Wales but we’ve beaten them three times this year.
”We beat South Africa by 50 points last year, it was tighter this time, but we beat them again.”
Johnson, normally so taciturn, is warming to his theme. Beneath the world’s most frightening eye brows, he growled: ”We’ve got no divine right to anything. We had to battle back from ten points behind against Samoa. We were behind at half-time against Wales.
”We’re not getting our own way like we were in the warm-up games.
”There are going to be times when we’re going to have to battle. You’ll see this weekend, it’ll be a close battle, it’ll come down to a few points in the end.”
Earlier in the week England coach Clive Woodward said his side didn’t have to play like Torville and Dean, emphasising that style meant nothing, winning everything when the World Cup is at stake.
Johnson clearly concurs: ”You have to do what you have to do to win. If we don’t play all-singing, all-dancing games, people think it’s disappointing.
”I’m boring myself saying this: but it’s about winning the games. I’d love to win all the line-outs and drive mauls for the length of the field but sometimes it’s just about winning the game.
”If we’d have lost last Sunday, the disappointment would have been huge. But we didn’t.
”On Sunday night, we could play well and still lose. I don’t think we’ll be able to pull off a bad game and still win — France are in too good a run of form for that.
”Hopefully the semifinal will pull a top performance from us.”
The last time England lost a Test while at full strength was in Paris two years and 20 games ago. Then, Serge Betsen got to Jonny Wilkinson and the Six Nations slipped away. Can the French do that again?
Johnson grunts: ”If Betsen puts a lot of pressure on Jonny, what do you do? The normal things. Make tackles. Put them on the back foot. They were good against us that day but we’ve beaten them twice since then.”
Looking at Johnson, jaw set before the biggest game of his life, the dominant thought is this. You’d rather he was on your side.
He’s made for situations like this. So are the rest of England’s thirtysomething big-game hunters.
Johnson laughs in the face of World Cup yips: ”Is the pressure on us greater than the pressure on them? I don’t know.
”We’ve got to use pressure as a positive thing. There’s no greater pressure than the pressure we put on ourselves, it’s as simple as that.”