Borthwick must pull off a minor miracle

STEVE Hansen isn’t wrong when he says that the 2023 World Cup draw is lopsided, but we’ve known for some time that the five top-ranked sides in the world are stacked together in one half of the draw.

- JEREMY GUSCOTT

 

We’ve got the Northern Hemisphere form teams, Ireland and France, and an improved Scotland, battling it out with each other, and with New Zealand and reigning world champions South Africa. Hansen obviously doesn’t like it much as a former All Blacks coach, and he knows also that from now on the Northern Hemisphere teams are just going to freshen up and get ready for the World Cup.

By contrast, the Southern Hemisphere teams will soon be going head to head in the Rugby Championship – and it will be interesting to see how the teams in England’s half of the draw, Argentina and Australia, get on against the Springboks and All Blacks.

Every now and then you get all the favourites in one half of the tournament, and Hansen, who is over here coaching a World XV to take on Eddie Jones’ Barbarians at Twickenham today, took the opportunity to say that England must be rubbing their hands together because they are going to get an easy ride to the quarter-finals if they do things right.

Hansen excluded England from his list of likely tournament winners – which are France, South Africa, New Zealand, or Ireland – and that assessment is reasonable, because, outside of the England camp, no one is expecting them to win the World Cup this autumn.

However, given their sixth place world ranking we should expect England to get to the quarter-finals, where they should play either Wales or Australia, and right now they could beat either of those teams. That might change if Australia show a big improvement during the course of the Rugby Championship.