Ashton and the truth

Today I attended my third press conference with Brian Ashton in a week. And as I listened to him trotting out the same old positive stuff that you really struggle to believe, I started to sympathise.

The point is this: what else can he say? Can he tell the truth? Do I really believe that he really believes everything he says? No I don't. He would barely be human if there wasn't a backlog of doubt building and building in his mind. How can he really believe he has a team who can perform when, over and over and over again, they fail to. They'll lift their performance, he tells us. They don't. They'll raise their game. They don't.

But he has to come along and tell us that they will. That's all part of sport's professional circus. But is he being truthful to himself? He can't be. He must have self-doubt, but he cannot betray it. He is an honest man being paid to be dishonest.

Why do I think this? Because last week in a team meeting - the Saturday team meeting which has been so fully reported - the players told him that they lacked direction, that they needed to know the gameplan because too many of them were playing to too many different tunes. If he is being told that now, after weeks and weeks training together, then he must have self-doubt. He must really really wonder.

Is that worth sympathy? Maybe not. The short answer is that he's on a splendid salary to be England's no1 and he ain't giving England value for money. Personally I do not now believe that he will give value until there is further restructuring.

But that is for further down the line. For now, he has to come forward and rattle on about this team's unfulfilled potential. England will probably beat Samoa tomorrow, and then Tonga next week - in which case Ashton will have another two weeks' wheeling out the same rhetoric.

At the end of it, he may just get the opportunity to be honest and explain really, exactly, in fine detail where it has all gone wrong.

Comments

[Angus Gardner]

I wonder if the England team management should take a leaf out of the book belonging to that of the Australians and start saying mean and nasty things about our antipodean cousins? It seems to be doing the trick for them...

Speaking of alternative approaches, is there any truth in the rumour that at the start of next year the England team will be training at altitude in the Alpine ski resort of Verbier? If so will The Times be sending out a correspondent to monitor their progress?

More of your blog please, we love it.