KEY POINTS:
Martin Johnson used to be rather good at the numbers game during his playing days - "You thump me once, I'll thump you twice" - but those doing the maths in respect of the new England rugby manager's first shot at team selection must be scratching their heads
in disbelief at the pace and scale of change.
Johnson is sending six uncapped players, plus a fistful of international rookies, to New Zealand for next month's test series with the All Blacks. Remarkably, less than 50 per cent of the party who crossed the water for last year's World Cup campaign in France will board the plane to Auckland.
There are some heavy fallers. Two Gloucester backs, Iain Balshaw and Lesley Vainikolo, have been dropped - not merely to the ranks of the second-string Saxons squad, like some, but altogether. The manager's predecessor at the head of the red rose operation, Brian Ashton, stood by Balshaw and Vainikolo throughout the recent Six Nations Championship and was held up to ridicule as a result. Johnson, rarely the butt of anyone's joke, feels no loyalty to either man and has acted accordingly.
Mark Cueto, who went within a whisker of scoring the try that might have won a second world title for England, is also off the roster.
"I've spoken to him and he's happy to take a break and concentrate on his preparations for next season," Johnson said of the Sale wing. Similar reasoning lies behind his omission of two long-serving Wasps, fullback Josh Lewsey and lock Simon Shaw, plus the Leicester halfback Harry Ellis.
Others - Jonny Wilkinson, Phil Vickery and Lewis Moody from the senior citizen corps; James Simpson-Daniel and Shane Geraghty among the young thrusters - are either recovering from surgery or in need of it.
Steve Borthwick, the Bath lineout specialist who played alongside Johnson in the England engine room in 2001, will lead the tour party. "He is the natural choice," explained the manager, who knows a half-decent lock when he sees one.
"The success of this trip will hinge on the players' attitudes as much as anything, and Steve has an exemplary attitude. You can play pretty well against the All Blacks and still get a beating, but if we go there and perform somewhere near our potential, we'll be very competitive. I see Steve as the sort of individual who will help make sure we do that."
Two of the undecorated quintet are hookers: David Paice of London Irish, who might reasonably have expected a run during the Six Nations but was overlooked by Ashton, and, perhaps more intriguingly, Dylan Hartley of Northampton.
A New Zealander by birth and a footballing front-rower by nature, Hartley was closing in on a World Cup spot until a Rugby Football Union disciplinary tribunal banned him for six months for gouging during a Premiership match with Wasps.
Northampton were relegated shortly afterwards, so when Hartley finally returned to active service it was at National League One level and, therefore, nowhere near as active as he would have liked.
Lack of relevant form - nothing could be more irrelevant to a test match against the All Blacks at Eden Park than a Second Division runaround at Sedgeley Park - has not prevented Johnson demoting George Chuter, his old mucker at Leicester, and replacing him with a bloke from Rotorua.
"Dylan has been on the radar for a while," he said. "Dorian West [the former England hooker and current Northampton forwards coach] is always mentioning him, even when I don't prompt him."
Was Johnson worried about Hartley's acute shortage of hard rugby? "We've picked him," he replied, bluntly. So there.
Nick Kennedy, the London Irish second-rower, and the Bristol prop Jason Hobson, an enthusiastic student of the dark arts whose willingness to mix it with allcomers puts him in the same bracket as the man who picked him, are the other uncapped forwards; Danny Care, the brilliant young Harlequins halfback, and Topsy Ojo, the free-scoring London Irish wing, are the new faces among the backs. Other players drafted in from the fringes include Mike Brown, the Harlequins fullback capped during the shambolic tour of South Africa last summer.
Despite the number of fresh faces, this is the strongest England squad named for a summer tour since 2003, when Johnson and company won one-off tests in Wellington and Melbourne by way of warming up for the World Cup triumph some five months later. But at this time of year, with Premiership and European matters to be settled, there could easily be an unravelling of the fabric.
Some of those included in the 32-man party - Lee Mears and Matt Stevens of Bath, Mike Tindall of Gloucester, Paul Sackey of Wasps - are struggling with injury. Johnson thinks they will make the trip, but he cannot bank on it.
Johnson won't be making the tour because of his wife's pregnancy.
"Would I rather be out there? Of course. But the circumstances are as they are, and it will be down to the guys on the ground to make things happen.
"Naturally, I'll be in close contact with Rob" [Rob Andrew, the director of elite rugby, who will play a dual role as stand-in manager and temporary attack coach] "and I'll be with the team before the Barbarians match at Twickenham just before departure. There will be no Churchillian speeches from me, though. That stuff is overrated in my view. I've heard a fair few of those speeches in my time, and I remember very few of them."
That being said, the only reason Johnson never promised to "fight them on the beaches" was that he played very little of his rugby at the seaside.
- INDEPENDENT
