England autumn 'not a trainwreck' under Steve Borthwick and why northern hemisphere are struggling - Danny Care column

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I've always said it – this is the hardest series for northern hemisphere teams. It's the best teams in the world coming to you at the end of their season when they've just been together for ages, and you're starting afresh. It's the nature of the beast, that’s why this global calendar would help everything, because then there’d be no excuses like that because everybody would be on the same path. Unfortunately, we're not, so you've just got to roll with it.

There’s no training you can do that matches a Test match intensity, so the southern hemisphere teams are definitely better prepared for this. You look at a team like Australia, they were in massive transition, they got those bad games out of the way where everybody's saying they're not good enough. And they've come over here, beaten England and walloped Wales. You hope people might be saying the same thing about England come the Six Nations, that they needed that autumn to get good for the Six Nations.

It could be similar to how the pre-World Cup games were for us last year, we were close to awful in those warm-up games but found something for the World Cup. It prepared us, we almost needed those few bad performances to work out what we were going to be doing going forward. I see the same here, I see England coming good for the Six Nations, I really do.

No one’s going to cry for England, with the embarrassment of riches that the RFU has. I do think England have got the hardest fixtures as the only team to play the three big boys, but at the same time, what an unbelievable experience it will be for the players. Sometimes the unbelievable experiences are incredibly positive and you get wins, but sometimes it's still a great experience for those lads to lose those games and see what the very best are doing, so you've got a real benchmark to look at and to work through how good you need to be to beat the best.

We are really close to being a good team. If we'd been blown off the park by 15, 20 points against South Africa, I think everybody's mood would be a lot different. I walked away from that game feeling fairly positive. I know everyone will say, 'You can't be positive, we've lost three games in a row'. I think if we'd won those first two and lost the way we did against South Africa, people would have been like, 'Oh that's fine, they're the world champions'. But the fact that we lost to New Zealand in the way we did, and then the Australia game has made everyone probably start questioning things a little bit more.

I think it's understandable, the criticism from some people – they're looking at it going, 'We've lost five in a row, how is that acceptable'. But I do think if you take a step back and you look at the transition of that squad, it's lost an awful lot of experience in the last six, twelve months from the World Cup to now. It's a completely different squad. It's a massive change, a massive transition and it is going to take time. The good news for England in this transition is they're not getting battered by 15 to 20 points by teams. If you look at, for example, Wales and their transition – they are getting battered by teams.

We're in a transition, and we're nearly beating New Zealand and coming close to beating South Africa. So it's not a trainwreck by any stretch of the imagination, but the problem is when you play for England, you put that white shirt on, everyone expects you to win every game. I think the coaches will understand the criticism, and I think they'll be saying, 'Look, it's a long-term plan'. And I do see signs of this team becoming really good. Sometimes you have to go through a few bad games to get where you want to be. I've seen environments, and I've been in environments or teams before where you look at it and go, 'I don't really know what they're trying to do'. But I do feel that this team is on the right track.

The Japan game is a really interesting one because you'd have thought if England had won one or two of their first three, you'd see a fair few changes for the Japan game, and lads to get an opportunity to play. The fact that they haven't won one, maybe the coaches go, 'OK, we need to stick with a similar team, we need to get this team winning a game again'. [Borthwick made two changes to his starting XV]

It's the last opportunity for Steve to have a proper look at combinations before the Six Nations. Our first two games are Ireland and France, so it's not like you can ease your way into that tournament at all.

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