England stride past All Blacks towards rugby’s greatest prize
Only four years after they were humiliated at their own tournament, England strode with uncommon authority to next weekend’s Rugby World Cup final in Japan, dispatching the All Blacks, no less, as if they were no more than the next hurdle that needed clearing.
When New Zealand became world champions for the third time in London in 2015, they were hailed without argument as the “most dominant team in the history of the world”, the very phrase one of their own camp had scrawled on a whiteboard in their team room two years earlier. In Yokohama, England, so far from their troubled homeland, harnessed the energies of a multi-cultural line-up to confound the anticipated ascension of the All Blacks to a fourth crown, one that would have been their third in a row.