England must finish strong with new bench

Need to improve in later stages of tight games puts focus on Borthwick and his use of replacements

- Robert Kitson

England's team sheets are beginning to resemble Mastermind questions. They've started but can they finish? So many tight games have now been lost in the closing stages that the bench is becoming the first place to look for a glimpse of how a coach is thinking and how he might be looking to approach the next game.

Steve Borthwick had to be seen to do something after Saturday's near-miss against New Zealand and, sure enough, other than switching the jersey numbers of his two centres, the only personnel tweaks are among the replacements. Gone, for now, is the 6-2 bench split, to be replaced by a more familiar 5-3 configuration, which now includes Luke Cowan-Dickie and Ollie Sleightholme.

Cowan-Dickie is there specifically to try to bolster England's physicality and scrummaging effectiveness in the latter stages of Saturday's Autumn Nations Series game against Australia. It was one of the areas that undermined England in the final quarter against the All Blacks and Borthwick needs as much hard-nosed resilience in his 23 as he can muster. "What I will say is that we want the scrum to be better than it was," he said.