England must find answers ...and fast

THE coaching churn that was a canker during the Eddie Jones’ tenure as England head coach has now spread to Steve Borthwick’s regime.

- NICK CAIN

The most worrying sign of this follows the bombshell decision this week by Felix Jones, a double World Cup-winning assistant coach with South Africa, to leave the England set-up after only seven months.

The bid by the Irishman, whose credentials as an talented attack/defence strategist have taken him to the top of the coaching ladder, to extricate himself from his RFU contract so soon is a body blow to Borthwick’s attempts to turn England back into a leading international force.

The blow was even more damaging because it came so soon after strength & conditioning specialist Aled Walters walked through the Twickenham exit straight into a job with Ireland. This suggests that unless he had a break clause with England, the IRFU bought him out of his RFU contract.

Walters’ timing could not have been worse from a Red Rose perspective. The influential performance guru of the 2019 South African World Cup winning side – who is a close to Jones since their days at Munster – left his England job just two days after it was announced that Tom Tombleson, his fellow strength & conditioning colleague, had been released following a pre-season Borthwick reshuffle.

The departure of the now unemployed Tombleson, who had been a popular member of the England support staff for a decade, had a domino effect. With Walters and Jones following-on, the three-man coaching exodus in under three weeks in August rocked Twickenham to the core.