What an incredible difference six weeks can make. Exiting Dublin’s Aviva Stadium on February 1, you would have got long odds on the fanciful notion that the just slain England would somehow finish above Ireland when the curtain fell on Guinness Six Nations 2025.
The post-round one expectation was for the power-surging Irish to bag an unprecedented hat-trick of successive championship titles, with the clunky English alternatively enduring another frustrating campaign, fuelling further concerns that Steve Borthwick remained out of his depth head coaching Test rugby.
Come to the final round mid-March denouement, though, and this early February assessment had aged brutally. Ireland ended the tournament looking stale, error-ridden and bereft of inspiration.
And England, by wild contrast, had instead become the grand entertainers, winning four matches on the bounce, scoring tries for fun in their closing two games and fully meriting their second-place finish a point ahead of their opening round nemesis. In Steve we now trust. Here are four English talking points following their humiliation of a hapless Wales:
The next step…
If England continue with their rate of progress under Borthwick, they will be crowned 2026 Grand Slam champions. They were fourth in 2023 with two wins, third in 2024 with three wins, and now second in 2025 with four wins.
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You can see where this is going… and it will mean that the photographers will get their trophy shot and not mass exiting as they did from the Cardiff media room on Saturday night when Yoram Moefana scored the clinching 62nd-minute try for France on TV which meant England wouldn’t be returning to the Principality for a trophy lift.
What Six Nations 2025 will do is put an end to the criticism suggesting that Borthwick doesn’t know what he is doing and is just making it up as he goes along.
He does seemingly have a plan and while there are times he struggles to convincingly publicly express that due to his habit of deflecting to platitudes, his team have lived up to what he said they would do after a frustrating Autumn Nations Series.
That they would win tight matches, that they would shore up their leaking defence and that they would play a bit more rugby and stop being so attackingly blunt. Borthwick has now earned the freedom to step forward with confidence and not have criticisms suggesting he won’t make it to Rugby World Cup 2027. He will.
You still feel that Borthwick is short a wise old owl in his managerial set-up, someone who has been there and done it all in Test coaching to be a sounding board in critical moments. However, he curiously dropped the name of Andrew Strawbridge, his unheralded Kiwi, into the post-game mix in Cardiff.
The skills development guru is just over a year on the beat and he now wants even more time with the players, which should bode well for an even better fluency than the 10-try display that had just crushed the Welsh.
“I was just having a conversation a few minutes ago with Andrew Strawbridge who, when he first joined up with us over a year ago, talked to be about skill development, the handling skill within the forwards, within the whole team,” began Borthwick.
“He has pushed that skill development throughout, from that first day when he discussed it with me right the way through to his week and he is pushing me for more skill development time. It’s brilliant to have a coach of his quality and experience helping the players.” It sure looked that way on the evidence from the Principality.
? @sageuk Play of the Round
?9 Minutes on the clock
? Alex Mitchell throws a 6.5m pass at 34.9kph to Fin Smith who reloads in 0.6s to pass 18.6m at 50.8kph to Tom Roebuck for the Try ?#SageInsights pic.twitter.com/lIXMzBhHJX
— Guinness Men’s Six Nations (@SixNationsRugby) March 15, 2025
The Chris Boyd effect
A long-term process benefitting England now is the revamp that Chris Boyd began at Northampton in 2018. He wanted to develop players good enough to become Test team 50-cappers, not those who briefly got a taste and were then condemned to falter in the shadows, unable to kick on.
Alex Mitchell and Tommy Freeman have both had their international setbacks but they have shown they can rise above this adversity and rebound all the better for it. The uptick in England’s spring play with Mitchell back at scrum-half with rookie Fin Smith outside him at out-half, compared to the annoyance without him in November when he was injured, was transformative.
England’s collective delivery of 25 tries in this Six Nations, eight more than the vaunted Ireland this term and 12 more than what Mitchell and co managed in 2024, will bring invaluable confidence to the squad that yes indeed their game is evolving at tempo and headed in the right direction.
Just like the trajectory of Freeman, who on Saturday became only the second player after France’s Philippe Bernat-Salles in 2001 to score a try in every match of a Six Nations campaign.
Not only has he brought the level of his wing play to enjoyable new heights, but he showed in Cardiff with his switch to outside centre that he can also put on a credible shift as a midfielder.
Bless the few kilos he put on a couple of years ago at his club to become a better Test option. He now packs a powerful presence… just look at his first-half choke tackle against the Welsh. That was a classy intervention at a crucial time in the game.
The still-rookie Smith and the debut-making Henry Pollock are the latest cabs off the Saints rank, two players with oodles of ability to go on and enjoy lengthy Test careers based on their influence in Wales. What they each delivered was very spick and span. Fraser Dingwall also proved his worth. Well played, Northampton. England owe you a debt of gratitude.
The Lions race
With just seven players starting all five matches – Ellis Genge, Will Stuart, Maro Itoje, Tom Curry and Ben Earl in the forwards and Mitchell and Freeman in the backs – there is no such thing as a closed England selection door.
That’s been good for Borthwick and his squad development and it should now also be good for Andy Farrell’s British and Irish Lions.
If a fifth-place England could manage to get 11 players selected on the 2021 Lions despite just two Six Nations wins, the expectation now is they can enjoy an even bigger representation on the back of a four-win, second-place campaign.
Itoje has proven himself as captaincy material and has more to offer than Ireland’s Caelan Doris while at the other end of the spectrum, Tom Roebuck and Pollock will be optimistic about being bolter selections.
In between, there is a plethora of fine candidates including tighthead Stuart. The 2023 Dan Cole recall meant it has taken him time for Stuart to shine but he is now one of England’s most consistent players and will be heading to Australia.
Ben Curry is another underappreciated jewel, as is Chandler Cunningham-South, who will travel along with backbone types such as Genge, Tom Curry and Ben Earl. So much for the Irish/Scots-heavy Lions predictions at the start of the season. England will very much have a dominant say.
?? Scoring two tries to mark your debut! That’s just what Henry Pollock did for England in a huge victory against Wales in Cardiff ?#Breitling #DefiningMoment @Breitling pic.twitter.com/xiTzyrVfaS
— Guinness Men’s Six Nations (@SixNationsRugby) March 15, 2025
Can we play you every week?
The media box at Principality Stadium is not for the faint-hearted as it has fans surrounding it on all four sides and the atmosphere can be bawdy, to say the least with the drinks flowing and the old enemy in town.
There were plenty of ‘stick your f-ing chariot up your arse’ references to be heard on Saturday, but no one could have predicted what would later transpire, several Welsh fans voting with their feet and walking out in disgust when the first of the Pollock tries was scored less than 15 minutes from the finish.
It was a sight to behold and a sad reflection on the doldrums the Welsh are now enduring having incredibly lost 17 Test matches in a row.
Borthwick tried to soften the blow in the aftermath, revealing that he had told the interim Welsh boss Matt Sherratt that England had endured a similar home humiliation when France put 50 on them at Twickenham in Six Nations 2023.
England have certainly turned their fortunes around in the two years since then, but it’s difficult to envisage a similar transformation for Wales as their regional system isn’t what it needs to be to quicken the recovery.
What it meant on Saturday was that the closing minutes unfolded with delirious England fans chiding the exiting Welsh supporters with shouts of “Can we play you every week?” It was a brutal confirmation of the English supremacy on the day.
