A season of mists and mellow fruitfulness be damned. This autumn has no room for artistic license or talk of transience for England. Instead, over the next four weekends from Steve Borthwick’s side, we need to see ruthlessness and a continuation of their seven-match winning streak.
Above all, just two years out from the next Rugby World Cup, we need clarity. No more smokescreens, or false dawns, it is time for England to stamp their authority.
Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and Argentina are all coming to town in the Autumn Nations Series. England should be targeting four from four. This is achievable, with a talented group of players, a developed coaching staff with added expertise, and all on home turf.
First, a recap: England head into this quartet of matches off the back of an impressive 2025 to date. Their Six Nations started with a five-point defeat at Ireland, but they backed that up with a last-gasp, one-point victory over France, a one-point triumph over Scotland and then a comfortable win over Italy before an absolute destruction of Wales.
With 13 on the British & Irish Lions tour, they won back-to-back Tests in Argentina and finished off their trio of summer matches with a commanding, lightning-delayed 40-5 victory over the USA. So it is against that backdrop, England welcome the Wallabies to Twickenham this weekend.
“We want to see consistency from England,” World Cup-winning second-row Ben Kay told ESPN.
“To do that it’s going to need accuracy. We often watch England performances and the criticism is, why’s Steve Borthwick — or as it used to be Eddie Jones — trying to make them play like that? And often, they’re not trying to play like that, they’re just struggling to be find the level of what they’re capable of doing. So you need to get into a flow and find a rhythm quickly.”
England went early this week with their team, an increasingly common hallmark of Steve Borthwick’s planning. They have had limited build up as a group before this match with Australia, the RFU slotting in an extra Test outside of the usual international window to maximise revenue at the expense of Borthwick having a pre-series training camp.
“Australia have had the summer together — since England last played together against Wales, Australia have had a Lions tour, and a Rugby Championship, so they’ve got that fluidity,” Kay, a pundit for TNT during the series, said.
“That’s the challenge England face.”
Ahead of the Wallabies, Borthwick is having to juggle match fitness, form, short and long-term planning. They have to win now but also build familiarity ahead of the 2027 World Cup. The contingent who were on the Lions tour have had a graduated return to match action this season.
Tom Curry hasn’t even featured this season for Sale, having undergone wrist surgery in the summer after the Lions tour, but he is on the bench for Saturday. But looking at the team for Saturday’s match, you can see Borthwick is starting to put the fundamental building blocks in place for the global gathering in two years’ time.
First up the eye-catching call to put Tommy Freeman in the centres. It’s a position he started in for England against Wales last March in that 68-14 demolition and that combination in the centres with his Northampton Saints teammate Fraser Dingwall shows continuity but also the stencil of what a World Cup double-act could look like.
Freeman’s shift there — having started all three Tests for the Lions on the wing — gives Borthwick space to pick Immanuel Feyi-Waboso and Tom Roebuck on the flanks, with Freddie Steward at fullback. Noah Caluori, the 19-year-old Saracens wonderkid, could potentially get his chance this autumn, but not yet. You can imagine he would have been invaluable in camp this week replicating Joseph Sua’ali’I’s astonishing ability under the high ball.
The call to pick George Ford at fly-half rewards his impressive form and leadership over the summer for England — where he earnt cap No.100 against the Pumas on July 5 — and pairing him with Alex Mitchell cements that Saints presence in the middle of the pitch.
Fin Smith and Ben Spencer are on the bench, but that means no Marcus Smith, or Ollie Lawrence. Of the two, Lawrence is the more unfortunate. And for Marcus Smith, he is victim of Borthwick opting for a 6-2 split between forwards and backs on the bench.
Marcus Smith is caught in the awkward no-man’s land of versatility, preferred by Borthwick as a fullback, playing his rugby at No.10 for Quins. For Lawrence, though he’s been fantastic since his return from an Achilles injury, he has to break up the Saints hegemony. That will be perhaps aided by England’s new backs coach, former Bath guru Lee Blackett.
The much-admired Blackett was seconded to England for the summer tour alongside Sale’s defence coach Byron McGuigan. Since then, Blackett has been brought on full-time and McGuigan is doing a job share. A penny for Bath and Sale’s thoughts, who have helped the greater good by lending the big dog two of their prized assets, only to have them snatched away.
In the forwards, Borthwick is prioritising pace in the second-row and back-row. Kay feels only injured George Martin could’ve disrupted the Maro Itoje-Ollie Chessum partnership in England’s second-row, while the pick of Guy Pepper at blindside — for his fourth cap, and Sam Underhill and Ben Earl alongside him, sees England operate with an astonishingly athletic pack, and one who will be looking to jackalling and speed at the breakdown to negate the threat posed by the tenacious Wallabies on the other side.
Having three Lions front-rowers on the bench is England’s version of the Bokke’s “bomb squad,” but you would expect all three to be back in the starting line-up against the All Blacks in a fortnight.
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There are always caveats and asterisks around these opening matches. For England, they’ll point to their limited training time. Australia, such is the farcical nature of the international calendar and regulations, are without four of their best players: Will Skelton, Len Ikitau, Tom Hooper and James O’Connor.
How wonderful it would have been to have a full-strength Wallabies team, showing why they defeated the Boks in Johannesburg and why under Joe Schmidt (and the incoming Les Kiss) they are bubbling nicely.
“This weekend is tough, Australia are a great side, and though they’re without those four players, England have to get up to speed quickly,” Kay said. “That would be the challenge. I think either Argentina or the All Blacks could cause them problems. But England are definitely turning up to the camp and saying, we’re looking to win four from four.”
There will be reminders of the forthcoming World Cup enveloping these next five weekends, with Wales versus South Africa on Nov. 29 the finishing act of this block of games. With ranking points and seedings to be secured ahead of the World Cup draw on Dec. 3, the various nations will be doing all they can to cement as favourable group line-up as possible.
All that comes back to the most basic and toughest of all asks in sport: winning.
England head into four sold-out matches with the crowd expecting further signs of improvement, but above all, that stamp of authority.
