Nations Championship<\/a> and get themselves to number one or two, they will be in a strong position to reach a World Cup final. That’s the ultimate goal.<\/p>\nPeople always talk about peaking too early, but I see it differently. These are the moments where you get all your learnings in, and if you go on a winning run then so be it.<\/p>\n
England are not going to go undefeated all the way to the World Cup, and part of the learning process is figuring out how you bounce back from defeat.<\/p>\n
In a weird way, I would actually like England to lose a game at some point, because what you don’t want is their first loss coming in a World Cup knockout match.<\/p>\n
England have been in total control this autumn and have shown they can win ugly too.<\/p>\n
Coming off that emotional high against New Zealand was always going to be tough, and in 2019 they were miles off backing up that famous semi-final win.<\/p>\n
However, they proved against Argentina they can do it.<\/p>\n
If they do deliver a big performance, say, at Murrayfield, then the challenge is backing it up the following week.<\/p>\n
When you are on a winning run you can really drill into the small details, whereas before everything was about selection, style of play, or injuries.<\/p>\n
England don’t need to worry about that now, it’s about refining the little things that make you a top side.<\/p>\n
Sir Clive Woodward called those the “one percenters”, the tiny details that make all the difference.<\/p>\n
Winning teams have the fundamentals locked in, which allows coaches to spend time on everything else.<\/p>\n
Loads of the current England squad have never had the chance to focus on those smaller elements.<\/p>\n
That is why Ireland and France have put together long winning runs.<\/p>\n
Now that England know how to win games, they can develop further to push at the top of the Six Nations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A danger is when teams hit their absolute pomp in the middle of a World Cup cycle. We’ve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-152056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}