When England took to the field against Chile on Saturday afternoon, there was a very different feel to the team, with head coach Steve Borthwick opting to rest a few key players and hand opportunities to other members of the squad, knowing that their two wins against Argentina and Japan in the previous gameweeks had seen them take a confident step towards a place in the knockout stages.
One of his experiments was to start Harlequins fly-half Marcus Smith at full-back, and it was a call that ultimately proved to be a positive one as the match went on, with Smith showing a few rough edges but generally impressing in the deeper role. It is not a new thing for him to get used to, given that he came on for Leicester Tigers star Freddie Steward midway through the pre-tournament defeat to Fiji, but it did give Borthwick and his coaching staff a few more options to consider going forwards, as this tactical analysis will show.
The key thing that England had to get right if they were going to start Smith and captain Owen Farrell on the pitch together was ensuring that they didn’t get in each other’s way, which has often been the case when Smith has played at fly-half and Farrell at inside centre, as shown in previous analysis pieces. That axis, favoured so much by Eddie Jones and initially by Borthwick, has seemingly been ditched after Borthwick realised that it left the team with a significant imbalance, but he does seem to like the idea of Smith at full-back and feels that that does not present the same complications.
Things did start slowly, but, as the game went on and as the team found their rhythm, England did benefit a lot from that call, with Farrell having creative responsibilities and tasked with distributing the ball in the same manner as he does for Saracens, whilst Smith was asked to simply run forward and use his natural pace to exploit gaps in Chile’s defensive line.
With those tactics in place, Smith never tended to get on the ball too centrally and instead frequented the wide channels a lot, acting as a second or third receiver when England regained the ball. It meant that he and Farrell did not find themselves in the same channels, as was often the case when they were positioned close to each other, and so England never saw the pace of their attacks slowed down as they tried to work out who would control the flow of their play.
In this particular instance, Farrell’s pass following the intercepting of Chile standoff Rodrigo Fernández’s pass by Leicester forward George Martin and Smith’s run from the back led to the latter’s first try of the match, with him gaining momentum as he progressed up the field and outpacing Los Cóndores centre Matías Garafulic to dot the ball down in the corner, so it was an aspect of their game plan that produced the right results in the overall context of the match.
That is not to say that Smith was prevented from displaying his own creative abilities though, but what was noticeable during the game was that he only deployed them when in the wider areas and in situations such as this, when Farrell was not in the same vicinity and so there was no risk of the same confusion and disjointedness that has been so prominent in England’s play over the last years coming to fruition.
By allowing him to distribute and connect the play in areas such as this though, England did give themselves a second key pivot, which allowed them to make an extra pass here and there and to create 2-v-1 situations, just as they have here against Selknam scrum-half Benjamín Videla. Previously, this might have seen Steward try to run past the Chilean half-back and score himself, but Smith’s natural passing instinct meant that he could drag Videla in here and then send winger Henry Arundell through to score his fifth of the game.
All in all, it was all about increasing the overall accuracy of their play and them being more clinical and tidier with the ball, and that was certainly aided in no small part by Smith getting into these positions.
The fact that the Harlequins playmaker was hanging further back than he normally does made that ability to drift around and to find gaps a lot easier, because he was able to read where the ball was going early and to make intelligent runs that created options before the ball had travelled into his vicinity.
It also meant that, again, he and Farrell never really crossed paths and the latter was always able to distribute from the breakdown without the worry of he and Smith getting in each other’s way, and that confidence and clarity was one of the reasons that the much-criticised England skipper had one of his best performances for a while on the international stage.
In this case, Smith spotted that the space was nearer the far side of the field and so ran towards where he felt he could influence proceedings, and it proved to be the correct decision as he was able to score close to the posts after Saracens back rower Ben Earl had passed towards him.
Again, he was able to make sharp changes of direction to evade tackle attempts from the Chilean players as he worked his way over the line, and it shows again why England could benefit from using him at full-back when playing teams against whom they will likely dominate possession.
It wasn’t a perfect performance, and, as mentioned at the beginning of the scout report, there were a few errors that he made that indicated how he is still a novice in this deeper backfield role, such as overhit grubber kicks and occasional inaccurate passes, and it should also be remembered that, with the greatest of respect to Chile, England were not playing one of the top teams at the World Cup.
However, teams can only play what is in front of them, and so, given that England were in cruise control for most of the match, they did well and many of those hoping to shine did so. Borthwick will also be pleased with the connections and fluency of their play, and Smith will definitely have caught his eye and will have given him food for thought looking to the rest of the tournament and beyond it.