Harry Randall hoping practice pays off as England aim to take final step

In the minutes before England went out to warm-up for their match against Wales last Saturday, Eddie Jones gave the team a last pep talk. “This is the day, boys, where you can really put the team forward,” he told them. “And old England and new England come together.”

Two hours later, they had won 23-19 but Jones, and everyone else, was still waiting for that performance he had spoken about. England are at an awkward stage, caught between the way they used to play and the way they want to, while Jones tries to blend a group of new young players with the survivors from the squad that lost the World Cup final in 2019.

They have been working on it in Bristol this week on a three-day training camp at Clifton college, before their back-to-back matches against Ireland and France, the two best teams in the tournament. England have it in them to beat both but will have to play better than they have done. England cannot afford to keep waiting for that moment when everything clicks.

“That’s definitely the vibe in the camp,” says Harry Randall. “We feel we’ve been very close, like in that first-half performance against Wales. On another day we could have scored two or three of those chances and then at half-time we’d be up by 20, 25 points. So we feel like we’re very nearly there.”

England had more than 60% of the possession in the first half against Wales, just like they did when they lost to Scotland, but did not manage to score a try in either half. So a lot of the work now, Randall says, “is around what we do when we get into their 22 and we’re putting them under pressure, how can we be more clinical in that area.”

Jones has been drilling them in this new “free-formation” attack, which in theory means that after the first