England's backs to the wall as win masks flaws

England 31 New Zealand 28

Jonah Lomu has been treating England the way a Baskerville-sized dog might treat a favourite lamppost for seven-and-a-half years now, and there was a depressingly familiar sense of dampness about the red rose army as this rivetting Twickenham Test moved into overtime on Saturday. The big bloke from Wellington had already scored two tries, as is his wont on these occasions, and assuming New Zealand managed the basics of a decent line-out throw and a nice little catch and drive to take them the last five metres to the English whitewash, it would be a classic case of Jolly Jonah up the middle and drinks all round.

But there was no catch and drive, and very definitely no Lomu. Andrew Hore, a Dunedin-born farmer playing his first Test, suffered a panic attack of major proportions as the unforgiving minute ticked on and he chucked the ball straight to Ben Kay, who had replaced Danny Grewcock for the final quarter after being dropped from the starting formation. All Black eyes were shut tight in anguished frustration – Andrew Mehrtens' face was a picture of utter misery – and when the referee Jonathan Kaplan brought the show to a close a few seconds later, Hore mooched miserably back to the dressing room with pain in his heart and Tana Umaga's sympathetic arm around his shoulders.

It was that close, and England knew it. Having caught fire for maybe a dozen minutes either side of half-time to establish a 17-point advantage at 31-14, they were given a horrible run-around for the remainder of the match and should, if truth be told, have finished second. The tourists might have scored four tries in a mesmerising denouement: Umaga decked a heavenly pass from Mehrtens when it would have been easier to take the catch and claim the five points; a barely perceptible fumble at a ruck under the English sticks, credited afterwards to the unhappy Hore, prevented a walk-in try for any one of five All Black backs; Ben Blair, freed by an exquisite flick from the outstanding Doug Howlett, was denied only by a last-ditch smother tackle from Ben Cohen.

"I would have been pissed off had Ben not made that tackle," growled England's defensive coach, Phil Larder, and Cohen agreed with that assessment. "If I'd missed it, I would have packed my bags, climbed into my car and driven home thinking I'd played my last game for my country," he said. He would not have been the only one thinking that way, either. Defeat would have holed England below the waterline and left Clive Woodward wondering whether his side – not to mention his strategy – is as good as he imagines it to be. For all we know, he may be wondering anyway.

Woodward trotted out the usual party line during the after-match formalities. "We'd been told all week by our friends from New Zealand that rugby is all about winning," he pronounced, "and we won." But it did not require the presence of a metapsychologist to detect that what Woodward said and what Woodward thought were far from one and the same. He and his assistant, the thunder-faced Andy Robinson, knew that the All Blacks had handed them a lesson in back-line creativity, and that just a few more ounces of New Zealand muscle in the bump-and-bore department would have been decisive.

This is not to suggest that England could legitimately face a charge of daylight robbery. Their front row were terrific – Trevor Woodman, the one relative newcomer in the tight five, scrummaged strongly and showed enough fancy touches in the loose to guarantee himself a run of games at loose head – and both flankers stacked up magnificently against a class All Black pairing of the captain, Taine Randell, and the sensational scavenger from Waikato, Marty Holah.

Lewis Moody's energy levels were off the scale, and he deserved his slithering try in the fifth minute of first-half stoppage time. Richard Hill, as dependable as ever, forced Lomu into a fumble and then dumped Umaga on the seat of his pants – a top-notch double in anyone's language.

However, the English backs were not in the same ballpark as their opponents in terms of the game's abstractions: wit, invention, imagination, the confidence to make things happen off first-phase possession. If Jonny Wilkinson was, by a distance, the pick of the red rose bunch – witness his chip-and-gather try on 45 minutes, perfectly executed with Blair on the floor and out of the game – neither he nor any of his colleagues seemed mentally equipped to push back the frontiers and explore rugby's outer space with the pioneering spirit common to Mehrtens, Umaga, Howlett, Blair, Carlos Spencer and Keith Lowen. With the single exception of Lomu, every New Zealander was capable of delivering, and prepared to risk, the killer, million-dollar pass under pressure.

And of course, Lomu does things no money could ever buy. His first try, a quarter of an hour in, was straightforward, but his second – an elephantine stampede over Mike Tindall, a contemptuous dismissal of Cohen, thank you and good night – was on the ridiculous side of unbelievable.

Phil Vickery, nobody's idea of a seven-stone weakling, did get to grips with Lomu at one point, but finished a distant loser. "Why didn't you slap him one, Phil?" he was asked. "When Jonah is running over the top of you, it's difficult to get in the right position," he replied, with a mournful shake of the head.

"I dropped eight kilos in two weeks to get myself in shape for this game," Lomu said, adding that John Mitchell, the All Black coach, had issued him with a stark ultimatum as to his silver-ferned future. "John went straight to the point. Basically, he said: 'You have these three weeks on tour to get yourself right.' I don't know if I proved anything out there, but it was a big game for me. It was either stand up and be counted, or bury yourself. I'd like to think I stood up. It was up to the old hands to show the young guys what Test rugby is all about."

Those young guys certainly listened to their elders and betters. Having played valiantly in retreat to reach the break only three points off the pace, they were then forced to swallow two converted English tries in seven minutes: tries that would have broken many a mature international side. This side was far from experienced, but they did not break. They retaliated with a passion forged in the fires of 99 years of All Black history. They even took on England at their own power game, churning their way to the enemy line with the ball up their collective jumper to earn a try for Danny Lee, the replacement scrum-half.

To their credit, England retained their discipline and defensive shape to the bitter end. But it was gut-wrenchingly tight. Next year, when the two countries meet in New Zealand and, quite possibly, again in the World Cup, the All Black pack will be an entirely different proposition, and Woodward will have to come up with something different. He should reach for his thinking cap without further ado.

England 31
Tries: Moody, Wilkinson, Cohen.
Con: Wilkinson 2.
Pen: Wilkinson 3.
Drop Goal: Wilkinson.

New Zealand 28
Tries: Lomu 2, Howlett, Lee.
Con: Blair 2, Mehrtens 2.

ENGLAND: J Robinson (Sale); J Simpson-Daniel (Gloucester), M Tindall (Bath), W Greenwood (Harlequins), B Cohen (Northampton); J Wilkinson (Newcastle), M Dawson (Northampton); T Woodman (Gloucester), S Thompson (Northampton), P Vickery (Gloucester), M Johnson (Leicester, capt), D Grewcock (Bath), L Moody (Leicester), R Hill (Saracens), L Dallaglio (Wasps). Replacements: B Johnston (Saracens) for Greenwood, h-t ; B Kay (Leicester) for Grewcock, 60; N Back (Leicester) for Dallaglio, 69; A Healey (Leicester) for Simpson-Daniel, 77.

NEW ZEALAND: B Blair (Canterbury); D Howlett (Auckland), T Umaga (Wellington), K Lowen (Waikato), J Lomu (Wellington); C Spencer (Auckland), S Devine (Auckland); J McDonnell (Otago), A Hore (Taranaki), K Meeuws (Auckland), A Williams (Auckland), K Robinson (Waikato), T Randell (Otago, capt), M Holah (Waikato), S Broomhall (Canterbury).

Replacements: D Lee (Otago) for Devine, 29; A Mehrtens (Canterbury) for Spencer, h-t; M Robinson (Canterbury) for Lowen, 49; B Mika (Auckland) for K Robinson, 61.

Referee: J Kaplan (SA).