Safety in numbers for England team

By CHRIS RATTUE in WELLINGTON

Body1: The English have landed, all 52 of them, but they arrived with a light touch rather than any thud of controversy in Wellington yesterday.

There was a time national rugby squads of a considerably fewer number would take on such long tours that the players returned fearing their children would no longer remember who daddy was.

This English team, of 37 players plus 15 officials, will play just three games: against the New Zealand Maori in New Plymouth on Monday followed by tests against the All Blacks in Wellington and the Wallabies in Melbourne.

Put it this way - they should have plenty of cover for injuries and plenty of experts to tend to any bruised bodies or minds.

They arrived in Wellington after 30 hours of flying - with stops in Los Angeles and Auckland - and a fresh-looking head coach, Clive Woodward, and forwards coach Andy Robinson fronted a press conference.



As Woodward well knows, rugby tests are not played out in hotel conference rooms, and he gave little away. And the English coach, who dropped in some impressive humour lines given he could have been excused for weariness, also shied away from World Cup talk.

"I'm not even thinking about the World Cup. Test match rugby is about today and tomorrow," he said.

"The World Cup will take care of itself. This is the end of the season for us.

"Our World Cup programmes start when we go back into camp at the end of July and have games against France and Wales.

"We will get our final 30 [World Cup] players from those games. You don't come to play Australia and the All Blacks experimenting."

Woodward was not about to blow England's trumpet either, despite the Grand Slam triumph and one world rating system that puts them at the top of the heap.

Woodward claimed he always regarded the current world champions as the best team in the game, so that accolade still belonged to Australia.

"We don't do the world rankings. It's done by a company called Zurich - they're very clever at putting it together," said Woodward, who offered some brief compliments to the Maori team.

It was all very humble stuff. The bottom line is that the real information game is played in the privacy of team meetings.

If possible, coaches like Woodward prefer to lull opponents into complacency rather than fire them up with even a hint of criticism.

There might be a few characters around willing to play by their own rules.

Wallaby No 8 Toutai Kefu was playing a completely different game when he gave South African golden boy Bob Skinstad a major serve during the Super 12. But such real talk is rare.

Woodward said England were treating the Maori game "like a test match", but actions speak louder than words on this score. The English will send their second stringers to New Plymouth, without the likes of Johnson and backline ace Jonny Wilkinson.

Woodward names his team for the Maori match tomorrow and that squad will head to New Plymouth on Sunday.

The Maori name their team today.