England vs Samoa: Owen Farrell at centre of England's big issue

Fly-half will be moving to No 12 against Samoa on Saturday as England coach comes full circle in his efforts to solve his midfield conundrum. Chris Hewett reports on one more experiment in fitting a square peg into a round hole

Owen Farrell in action during the England captain’s run at Twickenham on Friday (GETTY IMAGES)

There is more chance of a bloke dressed as Batman finding his way past the guards at Buckingham Palace than of an England coaching team cracking the red-rose version of algebraic geometry’s Jacobian Conjecture. We know this for sure because the conundrum created by the World Cup-winning centre Will Greenwood’s international retirement in the autumn of 2004 – a few short weeks after someone looking very like the Caped Crusader suddenly materialised on one of the monarch’s many balconies – has yet to be solved.

Heaven knows, enough people have had a go at it. Four very different head coaches-cum-managers have picked 19 very different inside centres since Greenwood called it a day after the narrow defeat by Australia almost exactly a decade ago. And while several of the names on the roster have all but disappeared from the memory bank – Stuart Abbott, Tom May, the spectacularly miscast Ayoola Erinle – others left more of a mark. Mike Catt, Olly Barkley, Toby Flood... some of the most gifted midfielders of the professional era tried to nail down the role. Tried, and failed.

This agony has been going on so long, it has developed its own generational dimension. When Owen Farrell moves from No 10 to No 12 against Samoa this evening, he will find himself occupying the very position occupied by his father, Andy, back in 2007. The difference? Farrell Snr regarded himself as an inside centre, insofar as he considered himself to be anything specific in the union game following his late-career move from rugby league, while Farrell Jnr thinks of himself as something else entirely.

“As far as I see it, you’ve got another 10 playing at 12,” he said a couple of days ago, after confirmation that George Ford, his old schoolmate and age-group partner, is to make his first international start at outside-half – the job Farrell has done for virtually the whole of his Test career. “I’m not one of your out-and-out classic centres, so we’ll have to see how it goes. In the end, it depends what the coaches want from their 12. There are some very good 12s around, so it comes down to whether they want to see two 10s on the field.”

Compared with his immediate predecessors, the current England coach, Stuart Lancaster, has kept his roll-call of No 12 candidates in some kind of check. He even managed to negotiate the whole of this year’s Six Nations with Billy Twelvetrees of Gloucester partnering Luther Burrell of Northampton in a midfield formation completed by Farrell in the pivot position.

And very promising it looked too, until the fixture schedule from hell intervened and Lancaster was forced to field a whole new combination against the All Blacks in Auckland. Since when, English knickers have been in an all too familiar twist, to the extent that, after 32 games at the helm, the coach has come full circle by pairing Farrell and Brad Barritt for this potentially hazardous rumble with the men from the South Seas. These were the very men who filled the centre positions when Lancaster fielded an England side for the first time, against Scotland in 2012. Talk about déjà vu.

Intriguingly enough, the outside-half at Murrayfield that day was dear old Charlie Hodgson (who, if truth be told, is probably the form No 10 in the country now, just as he was then). When Hodgson was pressed on Lancaster’s “back to the future” experiment, he did not sound at all convinced. “It’s a big call, moving Owen to 12,” he said of his Saracens clubmate. “He’s a strong character and he likes to have control of what’s going on. He might find himself going against what George is trying to do at 10.”

When Farrell says he will square up to the Samoans in precisely the same way as he confronts everyone else, it comes as some reassurance to a management team who treasure his razor-sharp competitive edge, his intense physicality, his fire-and-ice temperament. England are not so awash with what the revered Lions coach Ian McGeechan calls “Test match animals” that they can afford to marginalise an individual blessed with all the right psychological equipment. But while Farrell’s link with Ford worked well enough in the age grades, grown-up rugby is another proposition. If it goes wrong, what then?

Taken at face value, Farrell’s response to the loss of the No 10 shirt, not to mention the goal-kicking burden he believes helps make him the player he is, has been generous to a fault. “I won’t be piping down, but I’ll be communicating in a different way,” he said. “The main thing is that I feed George the necessary information – that I give him clarity, offer him another pair of eyes from the outside. As for the kicking, I guess it’s right for him to have everything. I like the responsibility, but I’m not too downhearted.

“To be fair, I’m just chuffed to be playing. I didn’t for one second think that, even if things were going brilliantly and we were winning every game, I was going to start every match from now until whenever. And at 12, I’ll still be connected.”

Yet, in reality, there is a greater likelihood of the two northerners engaging in a ferocious contest for one position than renewing their relationship in two – especially if Twelvetrees, the man who offers most in the No 12 role, rediscovers the best of himself. Farrell and Ford go back further than most Test players of their tender years, but if they were ever two sides of the same coin, they are very different people now.

“We’re not the same person, although I reckon we have the same values,” Farrell said. “We both love rugby and talk about it all the time, but we don’t meet up much outside of the Test environment because we’re both busy with our clubs.” If there is no meeting of minds this evening, this latest attempt to unravel English rugby’s deepest mystery will go the same way as all the others.