You know it has been a long rugby union season when it feels like it kicked off in a parallel universe. Was Fin Baxter even born when Steve Borthwick’s squad assembled for their first pre‑World Cup training camp on 12 June last year? Were those faraway August warm-up Tests some kind of tortured fever dream? No one can accuse England of not having squeezed a huge amount into the past 13 months.
It has been some slog. Sometimes, we can all be guilty of sitting in the stands or on a sofa 12,000 miles away and forgetting sport is played by human beings not robots (not for another couple of years anyway). We only see the most recent snapshot rather than the whole of the moon. So if England did flag slightly in the final quarter against New Zealand, whose actual fault is that? The weary players, the coaches who keep selecting them regardless or, above all, the ludicrous quart-into-a-pint-pot demands of the global rugby calendar?
