As an example, watch the England try against Wales to see how the Welsh defence is fixed by the threat of Burgess, creating space outside for Watson to exploit.

All top teams have some beef in the centre – think of Nonu, De Allende, Kuridrani, Roberts, Bastereaud – and they’re not doing for the sake of it. There are sound, tactical reasons for playing a unit there.

That said, whilst being big and being skillful aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s a combination that is somewhat harder to find. I cannot think of a English centre currently playing who is both. Tuilagi is the best of the lot as at least he can off-load quite well. Burrell probably second but he hasn’t set the world alight.

Jacob’s idea of a strong wing is a good one but on the proviso that they don’t just hang around on their wing but come inside looking for work. Yarde on form is probably the hardest to put down, but Rokoduguni is a decent bet as well.

Never understand that one’ lacking a big lump has nothing to do with defense; why do much people jump to that conclusion? Its pretty irrelevant in defense.

However, like we saw for the Uruguay game and also whenever Barritt played with JJ; not having a significant carrier to straighten and draw defenders in attack makes the space out side and in that 13 channel significantly smaller and more difficult to work in.

All of the the England team are professional players, playing at the highest level of competitive club rugby. This should’ve been a 70-80 point win easy, and yet because of our lack of accuracy, basic skills, and poor decision making, we threw away chance after chance to score more tries.

I can see no logical reason why that centre partnership has not had the time from the six nations until now to gel together and get settled as a unit. Not big enough for Stuart and Andy? Well they’re not exactly small though are they? And I can’t recall seeing either particularly embarrassed in defence. And selecting a behemoth and a bloke who smashes things with his own face didn’t exactly prove the case for size at all costs.

Job well done Kevin. Far more help to Wales over there than he ever was over here ;-)

I am, as I’ve repeated, of course much less impressed by SLs culture realignment HR courses than others which is why I would say he offers England very little – poor at being a rugby coach (by top 5 countries in the world standards).

I see Vuni on the BBC has been hinting that perhaps SL swung things too far one way so that it ended up being a sterile environment. I agree with this and honestly think it’s not too far to say that if you treat players like kids/drones off the field then you affect their spontaneity on it.

For me a classic SLism was how he dealt with the 30-3 result to Wales. Very little was made of the rugby (apart from blaming Walsh) – it was put down to the noise and what patriotism means to the Welsh. So the solution was to have a film on Englishness commissioned rather than, you know, analysing how the side got outplayed that night…

I’ve now gone from assuming SL will be sacked to actually thinking he might get another pop. The man appears to be a master politician – I think he’s already working on the right people, saying all of those HR things, bigging up the cultural change he made that saw a team perform worse than his pilloried predecessor. They’ll be calling him Teflon next if that name wasn’t already taken for Andrews.

Admission statement : We in Wales would love it if the current coaching team stayed so I find it hard to be completely impartial. When one of your biggest rivals wants your coaching team to stay put you know it’s not a good thing.

Wales were just as guilty against Australia, arguably far worse. Should/could have made a relatively easy 9-point gain during the period when the criminals were down to 13.

On the backs; it really did show what positive effect a large carrying center does. Tuilagi with either Slade or JJ is ideal. If we do pair JJ and Slade then we need a big carrying winger that we can bring into the game. Either Roko, Yarde or even using Tuilagi on the wing?

This game should have been an opportunity to put their hand up and say give me the shirt, I deserve it. And yet their was only a few that did that. Jamie George was excellent all round, and deserves another chance, Slade did well, but I though he looked better at 12? Kruis made some good carries, and worked well with George in the lineout. Launchbury was excellent as always, Mako did ok in the scrum and make a few carries, but looks better with Brookes playing.

There are some positives to take, but have to say that is only because of the individual players abilities, and nothing to do with the coaching. We need a new coaching set-up with a fresh perspective, and some different ideas. The lack of attacking nous compared to teams like Australia is evident in this match which should have been a cricket score.