Wales vs England analysis: Rob Howley’s decision didn’t add up - he cost Wales victory, says David Flatman

David Rogers/Getty Images
David Flatman13 February 2017

As a former player, I know how the midweek conversations between player and coach play out. When not chosen in the starting team, lots of players will ask why, before pleading their case.

All too often this leads to a coach promising a player a certain amount of game time in order to placate him and ultimately terminate this awkward situation. I remember kicking off so much that I was guaranteed the whole second half — madness.

What happens if the chap chosen in my place has a stormer? What if he scores a hat-trick in the first half an hour. Do you still take him off?

Well, you’re a liar if you don’t, so it kind of has to happen.

We used to call this ‘substituting by numbers’ and it still seemingly happens at the top level. A key skill, surely, of a professional head coach should be to read the game in front of him and make changes when appropriate, or leave well alone.

Deciding pre-match when a player might leave the reserves’ bench and sticking to it regardless — as Wales’ Rob Howley appeared to do on Saturday as Ross Moriarty (below) was pulled off for Taulupe Faletau despite being the best player on the field by about a hundred miles — so often just doesn’t work. You can get away with it against, respectfully, a team like Italy, but top sides will always demand more thought and control.

In Pictures | Wales vs England | Six Nations | 11/02/2017

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Think back to the last World Cup when England took off Sam Burgess against Wales. Burgess wasn’t playing out of his skin but he was doing a comprehensive job of containing Jamie Roberts, the key man in Wales’ quest for momentum. As soon as Burgess went off — and call it coincidental if you like — Wales began to make ground, and the rest is history.

There is no way Eddie Jones’ removal of his captain on Saturday after 46 minutes was planned. Removing your leader that early is almost unheard of but Jones reads the game. He feels it, and it was unquestionably the correct call, as Dylan Hartley wasn’t at his best and Jamie George, as usual, added a visible measure of tempo to England’s work with ball in hand.

We’ve also seen Jones remove Teimana Harrison and Luther Burrell during first halves and this is even less common. But both calls were done on feel and both were intelligent and uncompromising.

We don’t know if Howley promised Faletau a certain amount of game time on Saturday, or whether he just had it in his mind that a player that good had to be involved at the end of the game regardless. On the day, though, Moriarty hit such a level of performance that only injury should have seen him brought off.

So if not Moriarty then who? Who should have made way for the world- class Faletau? This question has been asked a lot since the game but I think it’s the wrong one.

I think the question should have been whether anyone needed replacing by Faletau and they did not. That Welsh back row was quite outstanding and should have been left alone.

With Moriarty coming off and James Haskell and Ben Teo coming on, I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to claim that substituting by numbers saved England’s unbeaten record.

Listen to the Flats and Shanks podcast, with David Flatman and Tom Shanklin.

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