England find that old habits die hard

One day soon, English rugby is going to ignite into a pageant of joyous running and passing. And one day soon, Vladimir and Estragon are going to stop waiting for Godot. There is a line in that play that might lead us close to the truth: "Habit is a great deadener."

England arrived in Paris last week to discover that the French had built a better stadium than theirs. Then they found out that they had come up with a better team, too. France 2, England 0. Clive Woodward's men are on a run of five matches without a victory and in football, the lynch mob would probably already have ridden out. Woodward still has a large measure of public sympathy because he is trying to achieve something pretty unique - stop the English being so English.

The wonder of the Five Nations Championship is that no one really remembers the result half an hour after the match. We're talking about the spectators here, for down in the England dressing room, memories were less easily evaded. Woodward said the players were shaking their heads in disbelief that they could have played so badly. It was the most rhythmic motion some of them had produced all day.

Bath versus Brive the previous weekend was a poor match with a grand dramatic flourish and an English triumph. France-England was a corker with a crushing French win. These are 15 valiant Englishmen, for sure, mentally and physically tough, but it's impossible to escape the sense that something is wrong in the state of Albion. In the futuristic Stade de France, England were condemned to repeat the past.

"All our Englishness came out and we became quite conservative, which is something I don't want to have in a team I'm coaching," said Woodward. Among the many ills on parade were a tendency to attack the man rather than the space around him, kicking the ball straight back to the opposition and chucking the ball around as if it were a lump of hot coal. Throw in those vital missed tackles by Richard Hill and Mike Catt, which assisted Christophe Dominici's try, and the cosy post-match video inquest needs to be something closer to a Royal Commission.

All this may sound ridiculously hyperbolic, but history really is beginning to tell a worrying tale. A run of eight successive victories over the French has turned into a sequence of four defeats.

France were coming off a 52-10 mangling by the South Africans and were an untested combination. England's problem is surely that they are caught between trying to do what they used to do so successfully (suffocate and batter the opposition) and embracing the style of rugby that Woodward believes ultimately wins World Cups. "It's not difficult to ask them, it's just difficult to get them to put things in place," said Woodward. The gentleman's not for turning, obviously, and rightly so. It would be wrong to forget that in that 26-26 draw with New Zealand there were immensely promising signs of change. Woodward's problem my be akin to the one Terry Venables inherited with the England football team. He was confronted by a squad who had been playing pinball soccer every week and was asking them to alter their method fundamentally to adopt a more patient and thoughtful style. Again the task is to overcome habit. Under duress, the bad ones come out. Instinct is the hardest thing to coach away.

France could and should have had 40 points. In contrast to England, their first impulse is to attack with the ball in hand. When they harness that impulse - as so often they don't - they are irresistible. Those Englishmen returning to the centre of Paris were doubtless mightily relieved that they weren't going to have to spend the evening apologising for a scraped English victory or a draw which would have eclipsed, unjustly, France's sometimes luminously brilliant play.

Still, England have just played Australia, South Africa, New Zealand twice and France in Paris. Poor Lawrence Dallaglio must feel as if he has been wrestling with a dump truck. The remainder of England's Five Nations schedule might turn out to be a Red Cross parcel: Wales at Twickenham, Scotland away and then Ireland back at home on April 4th. How Woodward must wish the fixture list had run the opposite way.

The good news from Paris was that England scored a try that must have involved eight or nine men, including a winger, Austin Healey, all working in tight formation. The bad is that it was a rolling maul which grunted and snorted its way over the line early1990s style: a score via what schoolboys know as "a bundle". Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that Mr Godot has been delayed.

FRANCE: J-L Sadourny; P Bernat-Salles, C Lamaison, S Glas, C Dominici; T Casteignede, P Carbonneau; C Califano, R Ibanez capt, F Tournaire, O Brouzet, F Pelous, P Benetton, M Lievremont, O Magne.

ENGLAND: M Catt; D Rees, J Guscott, W Greenwood, A Healey; P Grayson, K Bracken; J Leonard, M Regan, D Garforth, M Johnson, G Archer, L Dallaglio capt, R Hill, N Back.

Referee: D McHugh (Ire).